


A Tale of Two Larrys

by OyajiFever



Category: Leisure Suit Larry (Video Games)
Genre: Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Cartoon Physics, Cartoon proportions, Clones, Collars, Cunnilingus, Existential Crisis, Femdom, Foot Fetish, Forced Feminization, Frottage, Height Differences, Humor, Knotting, Multi, Overstimulation, Pegging, Petplay, Praise Kink, Scent Kink, Self-cest, Sexual Humor, Some chapters have art!, Spanking, Toonfucking, Webcam/Video Chat Sex, cartoon logic, evil clones, mild body horror, musk
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-21
Updated: 2020-01-28
Packaged: 2020-03-07 18:55:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 46,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18879208
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OyajiFever/pseuds/OyajiFever
Summary: Reboot Larry meets Larry Prime. Nothing goes particularly well.





	1. KERSMACK

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks ahead of time for reading my shamefully unironic Leisure Suit Larry fic! Tagging several kinks and characters ahead of chapters so I hold myself to them.

Larry squinted across the pool. It must’ve been hotter out than he thought, because he was watching the weirdest mirage try to make moves on a very attractive lady at the floating bar. He was kind of jealous, actually – he had been thinking of slipping into his trusty little banana hammock and approaching her, himself. Larry took a strong glug of his weak drink. Maybe he should take a lesson from whatever trick of light was producing this swingin’ pseudo-lookalike hallucination at the pool today. This guy was even bolder than he was!  
  
The familiar KERSMACK of a woman’s hand hitting some schlubby jerk’s face jolted Larry out of his own head. Mirage Larry was reeling, the sexy young lady was sexily swimming back to the edge of the pool. Several other spa-goers were muttering to each other about what the hell that noise was, did you see what that jerk did, what a show, he deserved it. Flesh Larry struggled to parse how someone would slap an optical illusion in front of an audience.  
  
Mirage Larry reached up to nurse his swollen cheek and Flesh Larry mirrored it purely out of reflex. He figured he should find something else to call this strange doppelganger, because it was suddenly obvious he was watching an honest-to-god flesh version of himself. His evil twin(?) slumped over the rim of the floating bar and gave a wobbly sigh, so familiar that Larry wasn’t convinced it hadn’t come out of his own mouth. But was he really that short? Did he really look that old? Was he really that, uh...folically challenged? Larry (Flesh Larry? Was he sure that _he_  was really Flesh Larry? Maybe he was Mirage Larry all along.) reached back to scratch his head and was relieved to find hair where it had always been, thin as it was getting.  
  
The obvious differences he saw clashed with all of the incredibly subtle but intimately familiar similarities. The way he chronically slouched his shoulders. The look on his face as he scrunched his nose, replaying the failed score in his head as he tried to find where he went wrong. The twinkle in his eye and the smarmy, shitty grin as he realized that he just had to try harder next time, obviously. Just bring a gift next time, obviously. She won't be able to resist him forever, _obviously_. Larry hated that he could trace the path of this familiar stranger with perfect accuracy, because it was the same cycle he'd run through a thousand times himself. The tiny shitty doppelganger that was ruining Larry's day twiddled his fingers at the bartender, suddenly bursting with confidence again and ready to reward himself for a job to be well done, and asked for "a tequila sunrise on the rocks, baby~!" in a sing-song voice so familiar Larry could have barfed. He'd ordered the same thing earlier, said those exact same words to the exact same girl in the exact same say, had anunciated in the exact same spots ( _a te-QUIla SUNrise OONNN the ROCKS, BAY-bee!_ ) and had received the same lopsided, forced customer service grin from the lady bartender.  
  
Larry stood up, eyes wide and focused in the middle distance so he didn't have to look at this anymore, didn't have to think about it any harder. He didn't need this right now - this sudden and intense crisis of self in a tropical paradise resort spa he was _supposed_ to be enjoying on his down time. The forward part of his brain was trying frantically to convince him that this was stupid and a coincidence, and that he was bound to finally run into someone who looked like him one day. But the rest of him knew beyond doubt that he was wrong, wrong, wrong, and that he was a coward, coward, coward for leaving without approaching the man. Approaching himself. Whatever.  
  
Larry stumbled around the far side of the pool, through Larry's line of sight and towards the exit. Larry was fine being a coward today. Larry, however, was not.


	2. Larry, Larry

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A note to clarify for those unfamiliar or confused: Tall Larry and his buddies are pulled from the newest LSL game, Wet Dreams Don't Dry. Dumpy Cartoon Larry is pulled from the mainline games - LSL 1 thru 7, as well as Magna Cum Laude. Box Office Bust doesn't exist and isn't real and can't hurt me.

Lemma laid back in her seat, arms crossed behind her head. "I'm not payin' you to get into the drug scene down there, Laffer."  
  
"Lemma, babe, I'm clean as a bleached butthole. I'm telling you, there's another me running around here!"  
  
"You better bring me back some of that stuff."  
  
"I'm not on DRUGS!" Larry fairly shrieked. Lemma snickered at the pitch he managed to reach and he looked away from the webcam sheepishly, cheeks warm. "You don't believe me, huh?"  
  
"No way you funky little cokehead. I don't even want to _think_  about another one of you running around." Lemma leaned into the webcam and grinned. "Or if there is one, maybe you can get him to help you book me some gigs there. Howzat sound, Mr. Agent?"  
  
Larry frowned, but just like every time he frowned it was more of a pout anyway. Lemma gave an amused snort. "I'm workin' on it, babe. For a pricey pastel island getaway, this place is the pits!"  
  
Lemma tapped a finger on her desk. "I still think you're riding some kinda wild trip. You sure you're in the right place? I know a lot of people who'd kill for a week in La Costa Lotta."  
  
"Yeah, well, I hope they like country. I don't think this place has changed out their headline talent for decades. The chick they've got up there's just as dusty and outdated as the decor." Larry huffed and sunk into his cushy (and entirely too expensive) chair, arms crossed over his chest. "And no, she wouldn't go to dinner with me."  
  
"I didn't fly your tight little ass down there to mope around and chase the elderly, Laffer. You've been real good at getting me gigs so far, but I wanna branch out somewhere that isn't either end of the Lost Wages strip."  
  
"I'm trying, I'm trying!" Larry raised his hands defensively for a moment, then lowered them just a bit and smiled nervously into the webcam."You really think it's tight? Lance is trying to help me train my--"  
  
"Laffer."  
  
The hands went up again. "Listen babe, I've been pestering every man, woman, and troglodyte I can catch working here! I'm starting to think we got a bum lead." He frowned. "You might wanna tell your friends to stop killing for this dump. I'm gonna need a miracle to get you in here."  
  
_Ratat-tat-rap._  
  
Lemma rubbed her temples. "Christ."  
  
_Ratat-tat-rap._  
  
His eyes darted towards his door, then back to Lemma. He knitted his brow worriedly. "I'm not done yet, babe. I'll get you in here, promise."  
  
_Ratat-tat-rap._  
  
"You don't sound too confident about it."  
  
"Huh?"  
  
_Ratat-tat-rap._  
  
"You're tappin' up a storm on that desk. Fidgetting's a sign of stress, y'know."  
  
"N-no that's my, uh..."  
  
_Ratat-tat-rap._  
  
"...my door. Room service."  
  
"What? Shut up." Lemma scowled like she was hearing a bad joke. "Sounds like you're at *my* door, more like. You're the only guy I know who always does that stupid--"  
  
_Ratat-tat-rap._  
  
"Ugh." Lemma was back at her temples. "Go get that thing, Laffer."  
  
Larry nodded and got up, disappearing offscreen. The soft patter of shoes on the carpet. The sound of a lock clicking, a door opening. The first sounds of a "Hello?" cut off by a sharp gasp.  
  
Larry's voice. "What's good, Laffer?"  
  
A shriek. Frantic padding backwards towards the desk. A violent THUNK KER-THONK as something bumped the desk, throwing the laptop to the floor. "Larry! Hey!! The hell's going on over there?" Lemma yelled through the webcam. All she could see was the back of Larry's dumb suit at a dutch angle. He was sitting on the floor with the laptop, babbling incoherently at something in front of him that was being blocked from the camera.  
  
"Huhh buh, h-how?? You? M-Me? Why-- who-"  
  
"Shut up."  
  
Lemma furrowed her brow, trying to parse how Larry could possibly interrupt himself. The sound of a door closing. Soft padding on the carpet again. A strained whimper as Larry shuffled backwards out of frame, revealing Larry at the far side of the room.  
  
Lemma, for the first time she could remember, was at a loss for words. It was like seeing double, but it also wasn't. Small and stocky, couldn't have been taller than 4 feet or so, odd cartoon proportions that weren't unheard of but certainly not common either. Unmistakable features, the same outdated clothes, all repackaged strangely. The far Larry had gone strikingly gray at the temples, face creased by age and sun. He furrowed his brow and deep wrinkles criss-crossed his forhead - something she saw in her own Larry already. She even warned him about taking care of his skin, or he'd look like a polyester prune when he got older. She'd have to give him a good "told you so" talk later.  
  
"Which one are you." Larry's voice from an unfamiliar body, deeply serious and devoid of the light, goofy bounce it usually had.  
  
"Which what?!" Larry's voice, on the other hand, was threatening to wobble out of existence. "Which what am I what?"  
  
"Your NUMBER, moron!" Larry stomped into the extreme foreground. Larry on defense shuffled around again, knocking the laptop into a position to see him pressed against the far wall as Larry on offense approached him. The only reason he was able to tower over his frightened counterpart is because he was already on the ground. "Are we in the fifties by now? Huh? Or are you an older model?" Lemma could see him hunch over from the back as he pressed his face in threateningly. "Don't tell me you're number four. We're gonna have a real problem if you're four."  
  
"L-Lemma, c-c-c-call the--" Larry tried to raise his voice as loud as he could. "C-c-call the c-c-c-c-ops--"  
  
"Woah." The aggressive new Larry turned towards the laptop, jolting Lemma out of her shock. "Woaahh woahwoahwoah woah no." Larry sprinted towards the camera as Lemma scrambled for her phone. The speakers crackled as Larry grabbed the laptop and set it rightside up, his eyes meeting hers just as her finger hit the 9 and stopped to hover over the 1. "Hey! Hi! He-ey-eyyy. Listen, don't do that." He grinned awkwardly into the camera at her. His weird jaunty tone was back, but desperate. "Um! Hey. Sorry you had to see that. Please don't call the police?" Lemma stared daggers at him. A bead of sweat rolled down Larry's cheek. "Great. Lemme, uh, introduce myself. I'm Larry. Larry Laffer? Aheheh."  
  
Somehow hearing him say the same line in the same voice with the same weird shitty laugh at the end made her even angrier. Lemma pressed the 1, and her finger hovered over it a second time. "Okay! Okay okay. I get it, that wasn't a great first impression," said Larry, hands up defensively. "But if you dial the cops I won't get to tell you what's up. And I think you wanna know what the fresh funky hell is happening, right miss...uhh," Larry frowned quizzically. "Larry's friend? Wife? Webcam hooker?"  
  
"Friend. Lemma."  
  
"Lemma!" Larry gave a lopsided grin. "Well, no doubt we're the same person. That guy's got great taste!"  
  
Lemma's Larry shuffled across the screen in the background, catching the new doppelganger's attention. "Noooo nono no phone. Hey. Hey!" Larry left the screen again. A sharp thud in the background. A softer thud as Larry's phone bounced into frame.  
  
"NooooOOOOOoOOooooo"  
  
"Heyhey, time out okay?" Both Larrys entered the frame again, the taller one being led aggressively by the hand. He was still looking pretty ghostly, but had stopped stammering and shaking at least. "Okay. Listen. I kinda started that at eleven." He sat down in front of the laptop and dragged his taller counterpart to the floor with him. "That's my bad. Totally. This hasn't happened in a real long time."  
  
Lemma finally pulled her finger away from her phone. "This ain't new to you."  
  
"Nope. Um." Larry scratched his head idly. "It's...complicated. He and me, we're definitely the same guy." He pointed to him and his doppelganger. Tall Larry frowned deeply at the confirmation of his greatest fear. "But, um. On different timelines. Not in a time travel kinda way." He shook his head, causing his nose to bounce comically. Lemma suddenly noticed it was more pronounced than the nose she was used to seeing on him. "I mean, in a science-y cloning kinda way. Uh...I'm not sure how much of this I can explain on the fly. Y'know those seedy medical ads they run on Fredslist? The ones with cash prizes?"  
  
Lemma nodded.  
  
"Okay. Well, a couple decades ago those were in newspapers instead, and yours truly needed some blackjack money."  
  
"I can't be you." Taller Lary (Larry 1? Well...he couldn't really call himself that now.) blurted out, shaking his head firmly. "You're old and weird. We don't look anything alike!"  
  
Larry didn't even look at him. "You've got a birthmark on your inner thigh shaped like the Netherlands."  
  
Larry flushed red and went quiet.  
  
“Okay?”  
  
“...Okay.”  
  
“Great.” Larry shrugged at Lemma through the camera. “I mean...that’s about as simple as I can put it, babe.”  
  
Lemma finally put her phone down and went back to nursing her throbbing temples. A lock behind her clicked softly. “Heeey, honey. Oohhhh my god, wait till I tell you about today!”  
  
“Me first.” Lemma waved the offscreen voice over with one hand, the other holding her head at the desk.  
  
Erin slid into frame. No one spoke for several seconds as her face ran through several different emotions, none of them particularly good. “Oh. Oohhh.” She grimaced. “That’s too much polyester for one room.”  
  
Larry smiled helplessly at her and offered a sheepish wave. “Hey Erin.”  
  
“Popular, aren’t ya kid?” Larry shot him a scrutinizing look. “How’d you pull off getting  _two_  gorgeous women to talk to you long enough to get their names?”  
  
Larry scowled back at him. Well, tried to scowl. Once again everything seemed to turn into a less-than-threatening pout. “Shut up. I know plenty of pretty girls.” He huffed and straightened his shoulders out. “I know _lots_  of pretty girls.”  
  
“Does someone want to...” Erin waved her hand at the screen.  
  
“Science figured out cloning and used it on the worst person imaginable.”  
  
Both Larrys nodded in unison.  
  
“Oh...okay. I think your day’s been more interesting than mine.” Erin patted Lemma on the shoulder. “Babe...is this gonna get in the way of your gig?”  
  
“What gig?” Lemma grumbled, already reaching the end of her rope today. “Our darling Larryboy couldn’t book me anything down there, even with two of him.”  
  
“Lemmaaaauuh!” Larry whined. “Gimme a break! I’m bustin’ my ass out here!”  
  
“A gig.” Larry scratched his chin idly, a faint smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth. “You looking to book an act down here, honey?”  
  
“What’s it to you, stranger?”  
  
“WeeeEEeeEeeellll...” Larry darted his eyes towards his taller counterpart. “I’m sure you’ve run into Gary, right? Blondie, from the spa?”  
  
Larry nodded hesitantly.  
  
“Mm-hmm. Well, he’s got a _whole_ lotta swing with the entertainment board,” Larry grinned confidently up at his clone. “And there’s at least one ending where he’s  _very_ fond of me.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“I’m saying I can get your lovely lady friend that gig she wants so much.” He motioned towards the laptop. “And it’ll do her a whole lotta good, and it’ll do La Costa Lotta a whole lotta good to finally get a fresh act.”  
  
“Oh...” It took several seconds for the relief to dawn on Larry’s face. “Oh. Oh! Lemma!!” Larry smiled excitedly at the screen. “Lookit that! I told ya I’d work it out, baby!”  
  
“Not so fast, oh buddy o’ mine.” Larry held up a hand, his face suddenly serious. “You’ve gotta make it worth my time. You still in Lost Wages?”  
  
“Huh? Um...yeah.”  
  
“Good. Nice. You’re gonna take me back with you.”  
  
Larry blinked wildly at him. “Scuse me?”  
  
“You an’ me, we’re gonna fly back to Lost Wages after I get your lady friend that spot on the stage she wants so bad.”  
  
“No??” Larry shook his head frantically. “No we’re not? That’s not happening?”  
  
“Deal.”  
  
Larry turned to the camera in horror. Larry shot Lemma a smug, knowing grin. Lemma was already browsing for tickets on her phone. “Lemma!!” the obvious Larry shrieked. “You’re killin’ me here!”  
  
“I want that cushy tropical spa concert, Laffer.” Lemma didn’t bother looking up at him. “And you’re gonna come through for me.”  
  
“Nuhh-- Babe.” Larry watched as Erin pointed over Lemma’s shoulder and whispered something to her about that one being a good deal, and that airline being really nice actually. “I don’t wanna get stuck on a plane with this...THIS!” He gestured wildly at his tiny enemy, who was still looking pretty happy with himself. “You saw what he did to me earlier! He’s an animal! He’s a danger to my wellbeing!!”  
  
“TSA won’t let him do that at the airport.” Lemma set her phone down emphatically and Larry flinched. That was the period at the end, and he knew it. “K1098, Laffer. You’d better come through for me.”  
  
“Kaaayy, oooone, ooohhhhh...” He already had his phone out to jot it down. “Don’t you worry, baby. Larry Laffer’s here to make dreams come true!”  
  
Larry stared at him, stared at his phone, stared back at him. “You can write on those?” He whispered to himself.  
  
Other Larry rolled his eyes and tucked his phone back into his suit before finally getting to his feet. “Pleasure doin’ business, ladies!”  
  
“No...wuh. Why. Why?!” Larry was back to a frantic shriek, scooting onto his hands and knees as his awful little troll clone that he hated made his way towards the door. “I don’t need this shit, man! Why’re you following me home?! I don’t want you there!”  
  
“TooOoOO bad! Maybe I’ll explain later, huh? But right now _some_  of us have appointments.” Larry twiddled his fingers at the group from the far door. “Now If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a _very_ influencial young man to woo.” Larry chuckled as he disappeared. “Toodles~!”  
  
Larry turned back to the camera in time to see Erin sheepishly wave goodbye back, still looking pretty confused. Lemma folded her arms. “Cheer up, Laffer. Some people would kill for the chance to get to know themselves better.”  
  
He frowned, still a bit white after the whole thing. “This is a lot.” he mumbled meekly, eyes wet with stress.  
  
Lemma rolled her eyes and sighed, a small twinge of guilt manifesting as a twitch at the corner of her mouth. He was pathetic. “Go get you one of those fancy massage jobs. Use my card.”  
  
“And a nice fancy drink!” Erin chirped. “Just take it slow, okay? With this whole booking problem out of the way it’s smooth sailing ‘till you come home.”  
  
Larry nodded mildly.  
  
“Aw, hun. We’ll see you in a few days.” Erin shook Lemma’s shoulders a bit to get her to nod affirmatively. “You helped a whole lot, okay? You did real good.”  
  
Larry nodded mildly.  
  
Erin waved at him through the camera. “Byebye, Larry!”  
  
Lemma reached over to shut off the webcam. “Later, Larry.”  
  
Larry nodded mildly.  
  
Click.


	3. Planes, Pains, Automobiles

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I had to acknowledge Larry Lovage's existence. But I also used my galaxy brain lore powers to make sure that we're in a universe where the only ending to Magna Cum Laude is the one where he becomes Suzi's band tour road bitch. You're welcome?
> 
> For those who want a visual reference for the Dichotomy of Larry going on, there's a pic of both of these idiots at the bottom of this chapter. Art is mine!

Flight DC5038 to Nontoonyt Int'l, leaving in 40 minutes. Tickets from $200, one way.

He could just leave, y'know? He could catch a cheap plane back to Nontoonyt and not bother with any of it. Just go home to his shitty little overpriced island condo and forget this ever happened. Ignore that for the first time in 20 years, Larry wasn't the only Larry anymore.  
  
Sigh. He made that dumb spur-of-the-moment deal for a reason, even if he wasn't completely sure what that reason was. Maybe it was simple curiosity, and his lifelong habit of letting it complicate everything. Maybe he was worried about what this meant for what would come next. What would happen if something went wrong. If the plane crashed, again. If he had to jump, _again_. Would the next one look like him? Would it have his memories? Would he still be him?  
  
Larry looked toward the check-in desk, where his taller counterpart was wasting everyone's time trying to wring a phone number out of the pretty clerk who had the bad luck of working that day. Joke's on him, Larry thought. He'd already tried during his turn at the desk. But he wondered, still, how this could have happened at all. How something had gone so wrong that two of him had sprung up at the same time, and yet from two very different times. If anything happened, would the next Larry be him...or _him_?  
  
He pretended to pick at his nails when Larry stumbled up to him - boarding pass in one hand, the other nursing an angry, hand-shaped print on his right cheek. "Okay, bags are in."  
  
Older Larry brushed his fingers over the print on his own cheek, already fading. He didn't look at him. "Cool."  
  
Larry wrinkled his nose up and grumbled. "Cool."  
  
Back to picking his nails. The taller of the two rolled his eyes and turned to leave. "Fine. See you at security." Grumble grumble. "Weirdo." Grumble grumble. "Can't stand this old coot." Grumble, grumble, grumble.  
  
Larry looked at the departures board again once he was sure he was gone. Flight DC5038 to Nontoonyt Int'l, leaving in 35 minutes. Tickets from $200, one way.  
  
Sigh.

 

* * *

 

Larry was _mystified_ by the screen in front of him. He tapped on the "TV!" button and instantly an entire library was laid before him. He tapped "Movies!" and a whole rental shop's worth of titles flooded the screen. "Wowee..." he muttered to himself, swiping through an alphabetical list of films. "How'd they fit so many on here?"  
  
Larry rolled his eyes into his book. "You've been on planes before. If you're old as I think I was, you've been on a few."  
  
"Well, yeah. But they didn't have _this_ ," he pointed at the device set into the seat in front of him. "Last time I was on a plane they only had one movie, and it was _Grease 2_." He wrinkled his nose dramatically. "Yick."  
  
"Yick." The shorter Larry scrunched up his face similarly. "Nearly forgot about that one."  
  
"Yeah, and if you didn't like it you'd either have to sleep through it or read a..." he cocked his head a bit to get a look at Larry's book cover. His voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. "Pamela Anderson wrote a _book?_ "  
  
Larry looked at him. He felt like he was about to ruin Santa Claus. "Yes," he said slowly, deliberately, what he hoped was convincingly. "Yes. She wrote a book. She definitely wrote her own book."  
  
He seemed equal parts satisfied and upset by it, somehow. Larry looked at the screen and gave a small, worried sigh. "Jeez. Sometimes I think I'll never catch up."  
  
"Poor you," Larry huffed. "I think I'd pay a lot of money to be thirty years younger right now."  
  
"Yeah, well _you_ got to take all this slow!" Taller Larry gestured widely to the seat screen, the wifi light that just lit up with a little ding above them, the sleek little free headphones the flight attendents had been handing out earlier. "Some of us got thrown into the deep end, buddy!"  
  
"Don't _buddy_ me, kid," He growled.  
  
"Don't call me a kid, you weirdo geezer!"  
  
"Big words right next to the emergency door! One good push and I could--"  
  
"Break it up, you two." One of the attendants leaned over to set down their drink orders - both the same brand of cheap beer, not that they were trying to match. Both Larrys grumbled in stereo, earning an amused twitter from their attendant. "You're both lucky we're too high up to kick you off for a noise complaint." She began setting down a pair of weird tiny airplane napkins and complimentary boring pretzels. "If I talked to _my_ dad like that, I'd never hear the end of it."  
  
"Your wuh. Uh," Shorter Larry looked frantically from her, to his taller clone, back to her. "Nuh-uh. Hey-ey-ey." He waved to get her attention, but she had already completed her contractually obligated customer service and was busy getting the next row's orders ready. "Oooh no honey, I'm not his--"  
  
"Aww, _daddy_ ," Larry loomed over his shoulder and grinned the biggest, shittiest grin that had ever been grinned. "I'm sowwy I yewwed at you."  
  
Larry sputtered, his cheeks flushed with equal parts anger and embarrassment. "Sh-Shut up."  
  
"I'll wemember to wespect my ewders next time," he clasped his hands together performatively, eyes a-sparkle. " _Pwooooomise_."  
  
"Shut up!" Larry made a bold move to reach up and strangle his counterpart in front of a plane full of witnesses, but his infuriatingly tall enemy lurched his head out of the way, causing Larry's death grip to fall several inches short. His hands flailed uselessly in front of his target's face, his seatbelt straining to contain his tiny fury.  
  
Larry gave a contented sing-song hum, ignoring the tiny fists in lieu of flipping through the movie selection again. "I take that back, I think! It's pretty nice not being a crusty fart right about now."  
  
"Brat." Larry spat, banging his fist on the armrest in useless, petulant rage. "I didn't think I was such a little bastard. No wonder I didn't have any friends at your age!"  
  
Larry looked down at him, a bit insulted but mostly confused. "I have friends."  
  
"Bullshit."  
  
"I do! You saw Erin and Lemma. They're so real they paid for your ticket."  
  
Larry scowled up at him, arms crossed defiantly.  
  
"Fine. Fine! I've got even better proof." Larry was already flipping through his phone...slowly. Very slowly, with lots of mistaps, a bit of muttering and swearing under his breath, and all the grace of a geriatric who still owned a flip phone. Smaller Larry propped his chin on his arm and watched him struggle through his camera roll until, with a triumphant "ah-HA!" (which was quickly shushed by everyone in the seats around them), he managed to find what he was looking for. "Here, here!" Larry practically shoved the phone into his smaller clone's face as he spoke. "Looky here! We took these at the boardwalk last week!"  
  
He held the phone steady for his tiny counterpart to browse through the album. His face morphed from anger, to disbelief, to something mild and indecipherable with each swipe of his finger. Larry taking a selfie with a group of smiling people, everyone posed in front of a dubiously convincing sunset. Larry and several others cheering as a handsome young man from the selfie wound up to pitch at a stack of milk bottles. Larry and others pointing in awe at the top of a bell game as a stunning amazon of a woman, part of the group in the previous photos, swung her hammer towards the target. A candid video of Larry sitting at the end of a pier, surrounded by women. _Beautiful_ women. Women that the older Larry would have killed to be anywhere near at that age, to get them to look at him for even a millisecond. And there they were, and there he was, talking and laughing and shoving each other when one of them made a bad joke.  
  
But it wasn't him. It was _him._  
  
Larry pulled his phone back, flipped through a few of the photos himself and smiled brightly as the memories floated into the forefront. "I told'jya!"  
  
He took a second to make sure that his words were contained and deliberate, and not vibrating like his brain was doing just then. "You told me."  
  
Larry hummed and pinch-zoomed (after a few failed attempts) in on one of the photos. "This one was right before Nari figured out how to win that ring bottle thing. Something about trajectory or whatever." Small Larry leaned over to see a young Asian woman with colourful hair, using Larry's back as a hard surface so she could make calculations on a cocktail napkin. He swiped a few times. "Oh oh! And then we visited the wedding venue again." A photo of Larry and two younger men on stage, in front of a heart-shaped hedge. Larry chuckled and finally, to the other Larry's relief, backed out of the gallery. "Lance gets all emotional every time he sees that place."  
  
Larry didn't say anything. His teeth were grinding behind his lips.  
  
"But uh, yeah. That's the gang." Larry kicked his feet thoughtfully, going back to flipping through the movies in front of him. "Dick, he's the one with the hair. He's gonna meet us at the airport. Uh..." He frowned. "Geez, I don't know any of these."  
  
Larry pretended to get back into his book. He hoped it wasn't obvious that he was staring into the middle distance, reading the same sentence over and over while his mind raced to nowhere in particular. "Birdman is good."  
  
"Ooh..." Larry tapped around a bit, gently plugging an earbud into one ear. "Neat."  
  
Larry, beyond the fire in his brain, wondered if he took the right plane.  
  
The rest of the flight was quiet.

 

* * *

 

Baggage claim was a pain. It took a heated argument to figure out whose bags were whose, because they both owned the same ugly plaid luggage. Opening the suitcases did nothing, because they both had the same shitty taste in clothes. It was only when one of them pulled out a pair of suspiciously small underwear and threatened to use it to strangle the other that they finally figured it all out.  
  
Who invented airport parking lots? Were they blind, or just a maniac? Larry cradled the phone between his cheek and shoulder so he could shift his suitcase to the other hand. "Yeah, but which G lot? Okay, um...maybe we're close. You're sure it's G 260? In the east-west lot. Yeah." He squinted across the steadily darkening lot. "Oh yeah. Uh-huh. That's the sign I think. It's still a black Prenis? Okay. Gimme a sec. Uhh..." Larry glanced back to check if his new ball-and-chain was paying attention. He was more interested in picking at his nails again. "Erin told you, right?" he whispered into the phone. "Okay. Yeah, it's." Pause. "Something like that. Yeah, I know. Weird. Um." A faint beep sounded off at the far end of the lot as someone's headlights clicked on." Oh, I see you!" Larry reached as far up as he could to wave his phone around. A soft rumble as the car backed out and made a long, lazy turn towards them.  
  
Larry shuffled his phone into a free hand and put it away, just as the car rolled up next to them. Dick was bursting out the passanger door before it even stopped, and had caught the taller Larry in a hug before either could say anything. " _There's_ my guy!" Dick pushed him to arm's length and tousled Larry's hair, despite his half-hearted protests. "And still in one piece, too!"  
  
A familiar cough came from behind Larry, where Dick wasn't expecting it. "I'd say two pieces, my guy."  
  
Dick, bewildered, leaned around one Larry to see the other. The smaller of the two tapped his foot expectantly, until Dick finally pulled enough of himself together to force out a vaguely concerned smile. "Sure, my bad," he said, letting go of his Larry and bending down (and down, and down) to offer a hand to the new one. "Dick Ryder, nice to meet you! Or, well..." he sucked on his teeth pensively, "...would this count as meeting you? I'm not totally caught up."  
  
"Buddy, even I'm not caught up." Larry gave his hand a single, firm shake and flashed a lopsided grin. "Larry. Aheh...Larry Laffer? But I'll bet you knew that already."  
  
Something about that felt weird. Like, outside of hearing that line again. The shake was weird. "Sure enough! That's gonna take a little getting used to..." Dick looked down and realized too late that the hand he was shaking was missing a finger. Not that one had been lost, just that it had never been there. God, why do people even draw cartoons? "...So, sorry ahead of time!" Dick used all of his strength to throw a bright, convincing smile back at Larry.  
  
"Can't say I blame ya."  
  
"No kidding." Larry cleared his throat pointedly. "Can we get outta here already? I'm getting tired of airport noises."  
  
"Hm-hmmm. Okay, I get it." Dick straighted up and sauntered over to the other Larry, draping an arm over his shoulders. "You don't have to be such a grumpy guss, babe."  
  
Larry bristled slightly, his teeth clenched. "I'm a little on edge, bud."  
  
"Ooh, _bud!_ We're getting places." He shook Larry a little for emphasis, but it only made him tense up more. "You were dude-ing and man-ing me all last week. Told ya you'd fall into it."  
  
Larry blushed lightly. "Trying."  
  
Dick leaned in to give Larry a peck on the cheek. "You're doing great."  
  
Oh. That wasn't a light blush anymore. His entire face went a bright, blaring red. Larry felt like he was going to explode, and the feeling was definitely mutual. Larry Prime clenched his teeth and tried to channel all of his energy into pretending to be disinterested. "Dick, you look like a man with arms. Help me toss this in the back." He grabbed his suitcase and was already heading around to the trunk. "Either I'm getting shorter or they keep making cars bigger."  
  
"Oh! Uh, yeah. Lemme get that." He gave Larry one last clap on the back and sent him over to the car. "I'll get yours too, babe. Hop in and we'll get rolling."  
  
Lance was already eyeing him as Larry slid into the backseat. Leather! Cushy. He leaned in over the driver side backrest. "You been practicing while I was gone?"  
  
Lance grumbled noncommittally under his breath, tapping a finger on the steering wheel. "Kinda."  
  
"Your anniversary's next week!"  
  
"I'm gettin' there. it's just the four-four rhythm that's hard."  
  
Larry gave something between a pained grimace and a pitied smile. "That's...the whole thing, Lance. That's all a foxtrot is."  
  
Lance was quiet for a second. "...Yeah."  
  
Larry patted his shoulder before settling back in his seat. "We'll keep working on it."  
  
Dick slid into the passenger seat just in time for both of them to pretend not to notice each other. "You boys getting along up here?"  
  
"Yeh."  
  
"Mostly."  
  
Dick hiked a thumb towards the back. "You boys promise to get along back _there?_ "  
  
Larry's stumpy counterpart attempted to hoist himself onto the other seat, obviously made for someone at least a foot or two taller. It only took him two tries, to his credit. "No promises," he huffed, trying not to sound as out of breath as he felt.  
  
Larry smiled bitterly. "Maybe if we got a booster seat back here."  
  
"Watch it." Larry punctuated himself with a solid _click_ of his seat belt locking. "You're in strangling range this time."  
  
A soft lurch as the car started rolling towards the exit. Lance set his jaw. "I don't want 'em in my car, Dick."  
  
Dick gave his husband a light smack on the arm. "Don't be rude, babe. We're very fond of at least one of them."  
  
Lance glanced over his shoulder to check the next lane over. "They're gonna get blood all over the seats."  
  
"They're not gonna..." Dick drifted off to listen to the backseat conversation. Both Larrys were already pretty tense. He had dropped in mid-argument, but whatever the (guaranteed petty) inciting incident was had already turned into a series of blow-for-blow insults. At least I'm not three feet tall. At least I know what the Cloud is. What does weather have to do with it? You're stupid. You're old! You couldn't get a date if she walked up and bit your face off. You wouldn't even get to the walking. It occurred to Dick that there was a danger to sharing all the same buttons.  
  
"...Okay, they might. Kids. KIDS!" Almost by design, Lance hit a pothole and punctuated Dick with a rough jostle, knocking both Larrys out of their conversation. "Dad's ready to pull this thing over if you try to kill each other. Play nice."  
  
Larry and Larry rolled their eyes. "Whatever," the shorter of the two pulled his phone out and started tapping. "I've gotta grab a room at the Slumscape before I forget."  
  
"Aw man, I remember that place," Larry looked out the window wistfully. "Lowest rates this side of the strip. And they had that jingle, too. _Save that cash for the casinos~"_  
  
" _You'll need those hard-earned buckarinos~_." Larry frowned into his phone. Tap, tap, tap. "Jeez louise, why can't I find this thing?"  
  
"Oh, 'cuz they tore that down."  
  
Larry snapped his head toward his taller counterpart. "Scuse me."  
  
"Yeah, I had to Goggle it afterwards. Apparently someone finally got sick of the continental breakfast." He frowned worriedly. "Wait, no, got sick _from_ it. Then they died."  
  
Larry was already tapping around furiously for alternatives, and by the look on his face it was obvious he wasn't finding much. "How can they charge prices like that? It's _Lost Wages_ , not Bora Bora." He tapped a few more times and slid open a new tab. "Fine. That's okay. I'll give Lefty a call. He owes me a favour, I'll bet I can squeeze a few nights in that room outta him."  
  
Larry cocked his head in confusion. "He's got another room?"  
  
Larry stopped tapping. "What?"  
  
"Another room. Cuz I'm staying at Lefty's right now."  
  
"In the..." older Larry pointed up. "The one on the--"  
  
"Top floor," younger Larry pointed up too. "Uh-huh."  
  
Larry lowered his hand and used to to scratch anxiously at his neck instead. "Yeesh."  
  
Larry shrugged noncommittally. A bitter, self-righteous smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. "Just call someone else."  
  
Older Larry furrowed his brow and dragged his finger up the screen. His contact list hit the bottom almost immediately. "Someone else."  
  
His smile wavered, a little less righteous. "Yeah."  
  
"Yeah."  
  
Both of them were quiet for a while as Larry tapped around in search of a solution. In the front seat, Dick looked at Lance expectantly. Lance was shaking his head before anyone could say anything. Dick shrugged, not in defeat so much as understanding.  
  
The silence was suddenly broken by the sweet, groovy chorus of _I Love the Nightlife_ as Larry Prime's phone threatened to vibrate out of his hand. He fumbled with it a few times before finally holding it steady long enough to swipe open the call. "Yyyyello?" A pause before Larry's face lit up. "Hey-eeyyy, if it ain't my favourite nephew! Issat a new number?"  
  
Taller Larry bolted to attention and pointed to the phone excitedly, mouthing a silent _Nephew??_ to his counterpart.  
  
Larry mouthed _Nephew!!_ back at him, nodding along with the phone. "Ooh yeah, I've done that before." Nod nod. Pause. Grimace. "That deep, huh? Yeah, I don't blame you."  
  
Larry motioned at the phone. _Can I?_  
  
Older Larry handed the phone over to younger Larry, so he could talk to the youngest Larry. "Yuh-huh. Yeah. You're going..." Another pause, before a glowing smile started to creep across Larry's face. "On _tour?_ REALLY? Oh no, no. Not surprised, just..." Larry scratched his chin nervously. "I just get emotional every time I hear it, y'know? Course I'm fine." Nod, nod, nod. "Okay! Oh, is she? Oh, _IS_ she? Oooh-kay Mr. Lovage, thanks for givin' me a ring! Tell your girl I said hi, huh?" Pause. Larry's eyes went wide for a moment. "Your _girls!_ That's what I meant. Okayokay, stay safe! Buh-bye."  
  
Click. Larry stared at the phone in his hand for a while, until his shorter self had to clear his throat pointedly. He looked at him as he passed the phone back, face aglow and eyes watery. "I can't believe it."  
  
"Ain't he a card?" Larry beamed back at him. "On tour! Like, the band kind!"  
  
"What a little dude! Last time I saw him he was barely outta diapers. And now he's all grown up." Despite the wide smile, his lower lip was quivering dangerously. "And he's _drowning_ in pussy."  
  
"He's buried in it." Larry choked back a lump in his throat. "That boy's livin' the Laffer dream."  
  
Larry nodded enthusiastically. "I've never been prouder in my whole life."  
  
Larry nodded back. "He's doin' good. We done good."  
  
Some sort of understanding dawned on the younger Larry's face. He had missed the whole thing. Whatever had happened between 1987 and the day he crawled out of that manhole in 2018, it had taken that from him. " _You_ done good," he said, quietly.  
  
The silence was thick, emotional and uncomfortable. Dick and Lance exchanged worried looks, unsure if this was better or worse than an argument. The car bounced as they reached the poorly-kept roads of Lost Wages.  
  
"I've got a love seat."  
  
Larry looked up at him wordlessly.  
  
Larry exhaled and rubbed the back of his neck. "I'm pretty sure you'll fit on it."  
  
His counterpart nodded, slowly. "Thanks."  
  
He looked back out the window. "S'okay."  
  
Dick shot a smile - sort of relieved and sort of helpless - at his husband. Lance, focused on the lights of Lost Wages ahead, finally exhaled. "So we're droppin' you both off at Lefty's, yeah?"  
  
Both Larrys looked at each other, then back to Lance. "Yeah," the taller one answered.  
  
"Aw man, I almost want to go in after you with a camera," Dick laughed. " _Elder Reacts to Clones!_ We might go viral with that one!"  
  
Taller Larry went white. "Viral?? I haven't gotten any shots since the '80s! I might die!"  
  
Dick turned around in his seat, but the other Larry put up a hand before he could say anything. "I'll tell him later."  
  
Dick sighed in relief. "I owe you one."  
  
Larry smiled knowingly at him, a mischievous twinkle in his eye. "You might owe me a couple by the end of this."  
  
No one else noticed. Larry was too busy trying to get Lance to tell him he wasn't going to go viral. Lance was too busy not telling him anything, because he liked watching him sweat.  
  
But Dick, he noticed. And after being taken off-guard for a moment, he twinkled back. "I might."

 


	4. The Less I Know, The Better

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Eventually people will have sex, but for now I'm too busy figuring out the implications of those missing floppies.

**_Pull yourself together_ **   
  
**_You should try your luck with Heather_ **   
  
**_Then I heard they slept together_ **   
  
**_Oh, the less I know the better_ **

_**The less I know the better** _

 

Larry groaned as he sat up, his back cracking angrily after a night of sleeping on a pile of rusted out springs that _someone_ had graciously called a loveseat. Some kind of weirdo hippy-dippy bullshit was floating from the direction of his taller counterpart's bed. Larry grumbled and blearily attempted to smooth out his impressive case of bedhead. There was at least a hundred different things he'd rather wake up to than whatever this was.  
  
 _ **Oh my love, can't you see that you're on my mind**_  
  
 ** _Don't suppose you could convince your lover to change his mind?_**  
  
"What the hell is that."  
  
 _ **So goodbye**_  
  
Larry - the taller one, who got the bed because he wasn't a three-foot-tall freak of nature who could fit comfortably on the love seat, which was definitely an actual real argument they decided to have the night before - rolled over a few times while his brain forced itself into working order.  
  
 _ **Better late than never**_  
  
 _ **Just don't make me wait forever**_  
  
"Mmmuh? Oh..." Eyes closed because it was too early and too bright to exist, he fished around on the table for a bit until he found his phone.  
  
 _ **Don't make me wait for--**_  
  
It took him a few taps to turn the alarm off. "Sorry. Did you want a different time?"  
  
Larry shook his head, his unbrushed hair bouncing comically in several directions. He usually woke up around now anyway. Something about worms and early birds, but the worm was his penis. "The hell are you listening to."  
  
"Oh! That's uh, Tame Impala." That was a little more chipper and awake than Larry expected. "I got turned on to them after I did the uh," he made some kind of wobbly motion with a free hand - indiscernible to anyone but himself, certainly. "Time-travely thing."  
  
His clone blinked at him.  
  
Larry kicked his feet under the covers. "I like them."  
  
"It's weird and sucks."  
  
Larry frowned angrily. "I like them."  
  
"What happened to, uh," Larry rubbed the bridge of his nose and fought through a yawn, "KC? Tavares? Beegees?"  
  
"I still like those!" He shot back, more than a little insulted by the accusation that he had abandoned his groovalicious roots. "Just, y'know...there's a _lot_ of cool stuff nowadays, right? There's this thing called vaporwave. And future funk!" He lowered his voice a little, almost in reverence. "It's even funkier than disco."  
  
Shorter Larry narrowed his eyes. "Impossible."  
  
He nodded emphatically. "I mean it."  
  
"Fine, I'll carry the burden of being the one with good taste." Larry rummaged around under his blanket for his phone. "This is my cross to bear."  
  
"Calm down, grandpa," the taller of the two said through an overt yawn before rolling over to the side of the bed. "I know anything faster than a four/four signature makes your ulcer act up, but some of us like to stay current."  
  
Larry flicked across the screen a few times. Bad news, bad news, cute baby mammal story, bad news, something about stocks. "Current, as if I didn't have to teach you what a gif was last night."  
  
"How was I supposed to know those things could move?" After some early morning mumbling and grumbling, he finally got both feet on the floor and began his quest for pants. "My bad for not paying attention to the advent of jifs while I was busy crawling outta that hole in the ground."  
  
The older Larry streched his arms up, out, and back over his head, grimacing as several joints popped audibly. He couldn't tell how much was age and how much was a rough night on a shitty couch. "You gotta show me this hole of yours today."  
  
"You wish."  
  
"What?"  
  
"Nothing."  
  
Shithead. "Maybe this'll make more sense if I see that place again." Larry stared out the window and wrung his hands pensively while his younger and far more awake counterpart scooted around looking for deoderant, brush clenched between his teeth. "Wrhy d'you cphawre?" he asked through a mouth full of foam.  
  
Larry Prime hesitated. "I dunno."  
  
An awkward pause. The sound of other Larry spitting into the sink. "Okay."  
  
"Ugh." Larry Prime groaned and finally got out from under his blanket. "Fine, I'm alive-ish. Watching you run around makes me feel old."  
  
Larry walked out of the bathroom, turned right around and got back in the bathroom, then scuttled out again strategically positioned to face away from his clone. "You could've at least worn some underwear on my furniture."  
  
"Hey, so, I don't know if you've noticed, but we're the same person."  
  
Larry Reboot was still shuffling awkwardly towards the far table. "It's still gross."  
  
He gestured pointedly at his own crotch with both hands. "It's _your_ cock, dude. It's not gay if you're looking at your own cock."  
  
"Don't say it like that, it's weird."  
  
Larry grabbed his underwear off the floor and finally started to suit up. "And don't give me that _'gross'_ stuff either. I know every stain on this couch."  
  
"Stop making this weird!" Larry grabbed a comb and ran it through his hair, paying special attention to where the bald spot on his older clone was. He hoped the old coot noticed.  
  
He didn't. "When's Lefty usually up? I should probably ask if he's got any ideas about this, too."  
  
Taller Larry went white. "We shouldn't talk to Lefty yet."  
  
Larry Prime stopped buttoning his shirt. Dick had been right last night; Lefty reacted, it would've been a great video, and Larry would've gone viral. The issue was that no one had thought to tell Lefty an existential crisis would walk into his bar at ass o' clock at night, and no one remembered that 30 years later, Lefty still kept a sawed-off shotgun under the counter. You know, for safety. "...We shouldn't talk to Lefty yet."  
  
"Maybe tonight when he's a little more awake." Larry tossed the comb over to his clone, who caught it deftly in one hand. "C'mon, lemme show you my hole."

 

* * *

 

"I can't believe this is still here." A light _tip tap_ echoed through the room as Larry's oxfords hit the sickeningly moist sewer brick. It smelled a little worse down here than he remembered. "I still don't know who'd wanna build a base in front of _Lefty's_ of all places. There's gotta be better real estate."

"You think?" The taller of the two decided to play it safe and wait for the rickety old manhole elevator to come to a complete stop before getting off. He still didn't trust the thing. "Cuz as far as I know, Lefty's is the best place in Lost Wages to hide."  
  
"You're not wrong..." Older Larry mumbled, gently lifting the edge of a calendar tacked to the slowly deteriorating wall. July 1987, it said. "Jeez louise, this place has been abandoned for decades!" He turned to the left and noticed two legs sticking out of a pile of documents, a nametag laying abandoned on the floor beside them. The pants had rotted away enough to reveal that this former employee was currently a skeletonized husk. Larry grimaced overtly and shuddered. "Something must've got one of 'em and ran the rest out."  
  
Taller Larry wandered aimlessly around some of the rusted out equipment. A huge conveyor belt took up one corner of the room, leading out of a dark tunnel that neither of them was curious or stupid enough to crawl back into. An ancient desktop computer sat to the side, somehow still getting power from...somewhere. An old Magic screensaver he hadn't seen in decades played out idly on the screen. "Yeah, couldn't tell you what though. First time I saw this place was the day I crawled outta that hole." Larry flicked the kingly little bobbleheaded questing man toy sitting on the gigantic monitor and watched him wobble back in agreement. "Have you checked that tape yet?"  
  
"What tape?"  
  
Taller Larry waved toward a dusty old ghettoblaster near the conveyor belt. "The one in there. Lotta screaming on that thing, maybe that has something to do with it?"  
  
Larry Prime popped the cassette out and scrutinized it closely. "Not kind enough to rewind, huh?"  
  
"I was in a hurry." Larry Reboot fished around in his pocket until he found a pencil, and tossed it perfectly to his tiny counterpart's awaiting hand. They were pretty good at that. "Don't tell me you forgot this trick, old man."  
  
"Not on yer life," he said, already cranking the tape back. "I'll forget how to ride a bike before I forget this."  
  
Larry blinked. "When'd I learn how to ride a bike?"  
  
"You didn't." The older him grinned mischievously as he replaced the tape with a rough click. "Just testing you."  
  
" _We've sealed off the catacombs. The experiment has failed._ " The voice on tape startled him, actually. It was immediately frantic, like this had been made as a final message in the midst of catastrophe. He felt like he recognized whoever this had been, but couldn't place it. " _Subject number four has become insane and uncontrollable._ " Scratching, distant clattering. " _It is not advised to unlock the secret door ever again._ "  
  
Larry glanced uneasily towards the giant icon of a mountaintop on the near wall. It was made of a series of hinged slats, like blinds on a window. " _Should it nevertheless prove necessary, the remote control must be pointed at the computer and the following numerical code entered--_ "  
  
"One two three four five."  
  
Larry turned to him, eyes wide, white as a sheet.  
  
His taller clone waved a little remote at him. "I've done this bit already."  
  
Larry Prime took one cautious step away from the slatted window, bristling visibly. "You opened it."  
  
"Yeah, and it was a whole lotta nothing." He pointed the remote towards the computer monitor. "Here, I'll show ya."  
  
"No! No no nonononono!" Larry was across the room in a flash, but was stopped easily by a firm hand to his forehead. He revved his feet uselessly against the ground while his taller clone held him at bay with a single outstretched arm, mumbling each number idly as he keyed it in. "Don't open that thing! Didn't you hear the tape?!"  
  
"Yeah, well..." Click. The ancient monitor in front of them ran several lines of code across the screen, then lit up a bright orange. Thunk ka-CHUNK. The metal blinds on the near wall slid open, flinging a great plume of dust into the air and revealing a new room beyond. "...whatever they were trying to keep back there, it's long gone."  
  
The hidden room was stacked with documents, old books, and assorted tat. The skull of a large, unknown animal had fallen off its trophy base and now lay unceremoniously on the floor. The room was surprisingly well-lit compared to the rest of the lab, revealing a whole lot of absolutely zilch, zero, and nada - dangerous or otherwise. The older of the two stopped struggling and approached the window, tentatively peeking through the blinds. "...Nothing."  
  
"Nothing!" Larry shrugged overtly. "Just as much nothing as the first time I opened it."  
  
Older Larry was quiet, his eyes frantically searching the room beyond the wall. Nothing, nothing, nothing. His clone was starting to get worried - it was always a bad sign when he stopped talking to himself. "So...this help you at all?"  
  
"No." Larry shook his head mildly. "Maybe this made it worse."  
  
Drip. Drop. Plink. The sound of a pipe flushing out somewhere in the sewer beyond the lab's walls finally shook Larry Prime out of his own head long enough to step away from the blinds. "Let's get outta here. I'm gonna come out with more questions than answers at this rate."  
  
Both Larrys hopped onto the manhole elevator for the ride back up. As the platform shook and began to rise, the older Larry glanced back towards the skeleton in the corner. He felt a chill from nowhere run down the length of his spine.  
  
If there was nothing in here, it meant that now something was out there.

 

* * *

 

Tuesdays were karaoke night at Lefty's, which meant the bar was completely abandoned besides a few brave regulars. Lefty tapped out another beer for Lemma, his one good eye fixed on the shortest Larry there. They had managed to talk him down from another shotgun fiasco earlier, but he still wasn't exactly thrilled about the whole thing. "Oh yeah? Well, when's my birthday?"  
  
"You never told me, 'cuz you hate birthdays." Larry gave a frustrated sigh and tangled his fingers into what was left of his hair. "Lefty, buddy, I don't know how else to prove it's me!"  
  
Lefty's lips pursed behind his moustache. "Yeah, me neither." He slid a fresh drink over to Lemma, then leaned across both Larrys to grab Dick's empty mug. "Top ya off, son?"  
  
"Twist my arm whydon'tcha!" Dick smiled brightly and gave his husband a rough nudge. "Get my man another one too, while you're at it."  
  
"M'not even done with my first one, Dick."  
  
"Then you've got a spare! Oorr I'll just take it," he twittered, linking his arm around Lance's. "What do I care? You're the one driving me home."  
  
"Glad you made that decision so fast." Erin giggled from the other side of Lemma. "How'd you catch yourself such a lightweight, Lance?"  
  
"Don't know what makes you think I did the catchin' here."  
  
Dick gave a hardy _"Mm-hhmm!"_ through a strong glug beer.  
  
"So, Laffer..." Both Larrys looked at Lemma, so she made a more specific hand motion. "Nono, the short stack. I've gotta say, you work some fast magic."  
  
Larry propped his cheek on his hand. "Heard from Gary over at La Costa Lotta, huh?"  
  
"You weren't kidding when you said he likes you." Lemma chuckled into her beer. "I'm not convinced he was even listening when I explained what the band was all about."  
  
"Ehh, something tells me he's pretty desperate for a new act in the first place. I just gave him an easy out. I can't take _all_ the credit..." He paused to throw back a big glug of his beer. "...Just most of it."  
  
"Well, happy to give him a change of pace. Hope he likes leather."  
  
"Oh, he does."  
  
"Peachy."  
  
Lemma wrapped up her drink in record time and Lefty was immediately there to top her off. The taller Larry shook his empty mug aggressively in his direction. "Hey man, I've been sitting on this one for like half an hour!"  
  
"Yeah, well _they_ don't have a thirty-year-old tab." Lefty slid a fresh drink back to Lemma. "Which, by the way; if you ever want to pay that back, I'm willing to drop the interest."  
  
"But add the inflation, right?" Erin chimed in.  
  
Lefty shrugged and pretended to be more interested in the glass he was cleaning.  
  
Larry Reboot frowned deeply. "C'mon Lefty, it's not like I meant to get stuck in a hole for that long!"  
  
"Sure, but that doesn't explain _you_." Lefty nodded his head towards Larry Prime, who shrugged helplessly. "Been busy."  
  
Lefty narrowed his eye pointedly at him. Larry flashed him a lopsided grin. "Hey, I mean it! Plus, y'know...not like I've been around to pay you back in the first place."  
  
Dick laughed a little too loudly and braced himself on his bar stool. "Laaarryy! You're sso funny, babe. You know PayPloy's a thing!"  
  
The shorter Larry rolled his eyes. "I was hoping Lefty missed that memo."  
  
"Not on your life, son." Lefty finished cleaning one glass and moved on to another. "How else am I supposed to move all my merch?"  
  
"Um," taller Larry raised his hand. "I missed the memo."  
  
"Oh oooh, okay. Sso you know how you uh," Dick tapped on the counter as he tried to put words together. "You have money, yeah? But the money's in the internet." Pause. Hiccup. Lance almost made some kind of motion to stop him, but decided against it. He liked watching Dick be the social fuckup instead, sometimes. Hiccup again. "And then you send it over the internet. Doessat make sense?"  
  
Larry narrowed his eyes while he tried to process everything. "I don't think that's right. I've already tried sticking money in there, it doesn't work!"  
  
"Nuuuooh you uh," Dick furrowed his brow and tried to think of how to explain the workings of invisible debit through a drunken haze. "You send it like...uhh...."  
  
He was getting ready to make some sort of unreadable hand motion to explain his point, but the smaller Larry next to him set his own hand over Dick's and pulled it back down to the bar. "I'll take this one. Hey." He turned to his clone and mimed holding a debit card. "Like a bank, right? But you just click a button to throw money at people, and you don't gotta go fill out that stupid little transfer form."  
  
Larry nodded. "I always hated those stupid little forms."  
  
"Hope you were good with money at that age!" Erin chimed in. "That sounds like dangerous info to have all of a sudden."  
  
"I'm just fine with money!"  
  
"No one buyin' that outfit is fine with money."  
  
" _Lance!_ " Larry shouted indignantly. "That sounds pretty frickin' ungrateful to me!"  
  
Lance bristled a little and glanced nervously at his husband, who was too busy trying to schmooze Lefty out of another beer to hear any of it. "Don't know what you're talkin' about."  
  
Larry grinned smugly. "Sure you don't."  
  
"Uhh...but while I'm bein' ungrateful." Lance motioned his Larry and the girls towards the backroom door. His voice wavered a little, nervous. "I wanna talk about the other half o' that."  
  
Lemma glanced over towards Dick, who was now distracting himself with a dangerous game of drunken Timber browsing. "Sure, seems like good time."  
  
As a drunken regular stepped up to the karaoke corner and got ready to sing a disastrous rendition of Unchained Melody, Lance and the girls scooted away towards the backroom. Larry tapped his smaller self on the shoulder as he slid off his bar stool. "Hey, can you take care of him for a sec?"  
  
He signed an o-kay with one hand. "I'll try to keep him off the floor." Larry, satisfied, scooted off after the rest of the group.  
  
"Cute, cuuuute, no, nuh uh, maybe? Mayyybee." Dick stopped his rapid left-right swiping and knocked his foot against the bar, teething his knuckle thoughtfully. "I dunno if I'd like that one if I was soberrrr. Hmm~" He swiped left. "Finnee, I'll be picky tonight."  
  
Larry set his chin on his hand and looked up at Dick. "You really get around for a married man."  
  
"Aw nooo, just scouting. Sometimes you get lucky with amateur talent, ya know?" Dick set the phone down and beamed at him with his chest puffed out. "Larry didn't tell you I'm a model."  
  
He quirked an eyebrow. "I can't say I'm surprised."  
  
"Ehee~ You're sweet." Dick held a hand to his cheek dramatically, as if it was a compliment he hadn't dragged out himself. "Yeeaah, just business. I don't do much chasing anymore." He glanced at his phone, giggled under his breath, swiped left a couple times and right once, then set it down. "Wee~eeelll, mostly business. I'll send that last one to Lance later."  
  
"Lucky man." Larry took a swig of beer through a particularly mischeivious grin. "So...we're on strike two right now, aren't we?"  
  
Dick tilted his head.  
  
He made a rolling motion with his free hand. "C'mon now. Saving you from having to drunkenly struggle through teaching a five-year-old what PayPloy is?"  
  
"Ooo~ohh!" Dick thumped his hand against the bar as the lightbulb clicked on. "Right! Riiiiight. That woulda gone pretty bad. Hmm. Uhmm..." he rolled his empty mug idly between his hands as his brain stuggled to gather the idea of a strike system. "What happens on strike three?"  
  
Larry ran a finger around the lip of his glass. "Whatever you want."  
  
Dick stared at him. You could hear the wobbly, drunken hamster wheel spinning in his head as he processed Larry's words. "You're, um...ehehh," he laughed a little, bringing a tentative hand to his mouth. "Really?"  
  
Larry nodded, his grin a little longer, a little sharper. Dick felt his stomach coil sharply when their eyes met, catching him off-guard. He supposed he should be less surprised that even Larry Laffer could improve at the art of the smolder with a few extra decades of practice. "Mhmm. You know, suddenly I think I'm too sober for this." His face was burning, and his hand was doing an awful job of hiding it. "I didn't know you could be so forward."  
  
"That kid's just not used to this stuff. I was even worse at that age, if you'd believe it. But a lot changes in thirty years or so, y'know? You learn things about yourself." Dick shuddered as he felt an intrustive hand glide over his thigh. He _knew_ shorts were a good idea tonight. "You learn a lot of things in general."  
  
Dick gave an amused huff. "Homewrecker."  
  
"Oh please, I'm not desperate enough to spirit away a married man. I'm sure your hubby will give you a permission slip." His hand slid around to the inside of his thigh, and he felt Dick shudder briefly. "Don't think I didn't hear you on the ride here. You're _very_ fond of at least one of me."  
  
He couldn't help but laugh a little. The guy wasn't wrong. "No promises. Lance has the last say, no matter where your hands are going."  
  
"Oh, sure. Your man Larry Laffer's the last person to tear people apart. But you seem like adventurous folks..."  
  
Whoever was on the mic was absolutely bombing the final verse - the one with all the extended notes and screaming. It was a perfect distraction, and Larry took the opportunity to rush under the leg of Dick's shorts, stopping just before reaching his crotch. Dick stifled a surprised gasp, as if the slaughter happening over the speaker system wouldn't have covered it up.  
  
"...And I'll call you more than just _'bud'_ , baby."  
  
Larry pulled his hand back as the rest of the group began trickling out of the backroom. "Just a little less black for this gig. Please?"  
  
"Ugh, fine." Lemma plopped back down on her stool and gestured at Lefty, who was already putting together another refill. "Just don't start crying again."  
  
"I wasn't-- I was sweating. The roof was leaking." Lance set a hand on his husband's shoulder as he sat back down. "You okay out here, hun?"  
  
Dick was very glad to be in a bar right now, just about the only place where being this red in the face was standard fare. He beamed brightly at Lance. "You're still driving tonight, if that's what you're asking!"  
  
Lance leaned in for a quick kiss. "I figured."  
  
"Hey," Larry knocked on the bar to get his clone's attention as he sat down. "Thanks for keeping an eye on Dick."  
  
"Yeah, well you didn't tell me he was _that_ kind of drunk!" He shot back, placing a hand on his forehead to swoon dramatically. "I feel like a piece of meat in front of this man!"  
  
"I complimented your shirt," Dick laughed, playing along.  
  
"I thought I was more to you than my perfect taste in fashion!" Larry swooned in the other direction and shook his mug expectantly in one outstretched hand. "I think I deserve compensation for emotional trauma."  
  
Larry Reboot snorted. "Smooth of you, old man."  
  
"Smooth enough to work, anyway." Dick flagged down Lefty again. "Yeah, one on my bill."  
  
Lefty rolled his eyes and tapped out another beer, then slid a frosty new mug over to Larry Prime. "Enjoy it, son. That's the only way you're getting more booze out of me 'til you pay off that tab."  
  
"Oh, I'll figure something out." He punctuated himself with a strong glug of beer. "We'll see if my blackjack skills are still up to snuff."  
  
"Yeah, I'm sure we'll scrape up enough between the two of us."  
  
Lefty stroked his mustache pensively. "What makes you think you're sharin' a tab?"  
  
"Lefty!" The younger Larry gestured frantically between both of them. "We're the same guy!"  
  
"Are ya?" Lefty pulled down another already-clean glass to start cleaning. "You still haven't told me when my birthday is."  
  
As everyone else started to settle back into their own arguments and conversations, Larry Prime leaned in to whisper to Dick one last time.  
  
"We'll finish this on strike three."


	5. Borderline

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> People will fuck next time, I promise. Pinky promise. In the meantime, everyone is rightfully worried about the possibility of a feral balding man in a polyester suit being unleashed on the world.

_**We're on the borderline** _  
  
_**Caught between the tides of pain and rapture** _

  
Thonk, bonk, _click_. Larry caught the alarm in record time, as if he hadn't been asleep at all. He shuffled onto his elbows and met eyes with himself across the room, also uncharacteristically alive for this time in the morning. They hadn't fought at all last night. Not over the bed, or the love seat, or their trip underground, or the existential conundrum they had created by finding each other. But their stint in the abandoned lab had shaken up something, and it had been creeping through both of them throughout that day. By the time Lefty's had emptied out last night and both Larrys had been shooed away to the upstairs apartment, an uncomfortable vibration had developed between them - a strange, awkward air that had only intensified over a night of sleep or lack thereof. Larry Reboot set his jaw and Larry Prime grimaced in response; both of them very aware of why they were awake, and the words that were about to leave Larry's mouth. "You have to tell me about number four."  
  
Larry Prime felt his back bristle like a cornered dog. "I don't know anything about number four."  
  
"Bullshit," He spat, scooting his back to the wall to sit himself up properly. "You were ready to beat the snot outta me before you knew I wasn't whatever that is."  
  
The edge of his mouth twitched, but he said nothing.  
  
"Don't you clam up on me ya old coot. You owe me _something_ for dragging you out here." Larry made a big, encompassing gesture with both hands. "And having to explain to everyone in my life that there's another me around now, and how it's complicated, _and_ how I don't have a clue why it happened, _AND_ how I don't even know why you're bothering to stick around!"  
  
Larry's eyes darted away, then back again. "Dunno what I'd tell you."  
  
"Well tell me _SOMETHING!_ " He still wasn't good at anything more aggressive than an overt pout, but he was doing better than usual. "Tell me what it is! Tell me how it happened! Tell me what this _means_!" His lip curled up into the closest thing to a snarl that he would ever achieve. Larry Prime flinched, just a little bit. "Tell me why you're so scared of it!"  
  
"It's _us._ " He snarled back. "It's us, _again_." He paused. "But worse."  
  
Larry crossed his arms and eyed his older self closely.  
  
The smaller of the two took a deep breath. "Okay, okay. Must've been twenty..." He pinched his brow, shoulders tense. "...No, thirty. Thirty years ago, I heard through the grapevine something went wrong. I was still working for PornProdCorp - you remember them, right? They used to crank out those real kinky VHS features that already looked grimy and worn out right off the assembly line."  
  
"Oooh! They did _Indiana Bones and the Crystal Cooch_ , didn't they?" Larry grinned and clutched his hands in his lap. "Boy, that was a good one. I can't believe they avoided all that face-melting by screwing through it."  
  
"That _was_ a good one." Despite the gravity of the situation, Larry took a moment to grin out into space and recall just how good that one was. "They're not really a thing anymore after the internet came around." He made a vague, flippant motion with his off hand. His younger self's face dropped, disappointed. "Or the corporate espionage. But that's beside the point."  
  
"Aw man...oh. Uhm, okay. Wait. Pause." The taller of the two formed a big T with both hands. "How'd you hear about this Four stuff if the only guy left down there is a corpse?"  
  
"Hooo _boy_ , you've got _no_ idea how deep this goes. That lab under us?" He pointed down emphatically. "That's just the first one I went to. They're _everywhere_. No matter where I went for a decade, I was standin' on top of one of those labs. Every time I drowned, or got stuck in quicksand, or missed a key item, or opened the wrong door, or was otherwise maimed, disfigured, or obliterated..." He flung his hand open as if to simulate a _poof_. "They cranked out another me on that big ol' conveyor belt."  
  
"Pause again." Larry shuffled himself around to sit on the edge of the bed facing his clone. "Who's They?"  
  
Larry gave an overt shrug.  
  
There was a pause between them while the taller Larry battled with himself over whether to believe what was obviously a load of cockamamie bullshit. It didn't take him that long to realize that the fact he was talking to a version of himself from the future was proof enough. "Why."  
  
Larry shrugged again. "They gave me blackjack money. Told you already."  
  
He wrinkled his nose up in frustration. He _did_ say that already, and it _still_ sounded like something he would do.  
  
"So thirty years ago, PornProd sends me out on this big errand. That goes..." Larry grimaced. "About as smooth as you'd expect. You get it."  
  
Larry grimaced too. About as well as any of his big stupid errands ever turned out. He got it.  
  
"So every time I ended up there, the techs - they never really talked to me, right? I was just a long-term lab rat. Just another duplicate monkey they spat out, yeah? But they did a _lot_ of talking with each other." He nodded up into the ceiling as his brain worked on recalling everything. It hadn't really hit him how long ago this had been until he tried to talk about it. He had _never_ talked about it. "So one day thirty years ago, I notice they're talkin' about something new. There's this _thing_ the Lost Wages lab had - Number Four, they kept calling it - and all I could gleen from all the science mumbo-jumbo was that it's a clone that's gone different."  
  
The taller Larry set his jaw, doubtful. "Who's to say it's one of us?"  
  
"Never saw anyone else getting duped down there! You hear about any cloning shenanigans before me?"  
  
He rolled his eyes. "Fine. Number Four."  
  
"So Number Four, they were _nuts_ over it. Every time I had to get recombobulated I woke up to new gossip about this thing. Number four this, Number Four that. Number Four might be dangerous. Number four might be a breakthrough! They were really excited the first few times...then they started talking about incidents." His face dropped slowly as he spoke. "Then damages, then injuries." He began to pick at his nails anxiously. "Then they stopped talking about it."  
  
"...So they locked it up." Larry looked down at his lap where his hands sat fiddling with themselves.  
  
"They _tried_ to lock it up."  
  
An awkward silence fell between the two. Larry Prime still wouldn't look at him.  
  
"I didn't... _know_ that it was out." The older of them wrung his hands tightly as he spoke. He tried to hide the wobble in his voice and was failing, miserably. "I _thought_ it might be. But I haven't been maimed, disfigured, or obliterated in twenty years. That tape's the first I've heard about this thing in decades."  
  
"Who knows what's happened since then." Larry Reboot blurted out quickly, maybe desperately. "The tape said this thing was unstable. Maybe it didn't survive out here." His initial burst of anger had long since petered out, and now he was left with a vague, gnawing fear in the pit of his stomach. He scratched at the back of his neck. "Maybe it's nothing."  
  
"...Maybe it's nothing." Larry Prime hopped off his love seat (Still not wearing underwear. Jackass.) and started picking up his clothes.  
  
"Maybe it sorted itself out." More neck scratching, rougher now.  
  
"Maybe." He shuffled his pants up to his hips, facing away from himself. "But I doubt it."  
  
Larry stopped scratching and looked at the ground, letting the words roll around in his head. The gnawing got worse. "...Me too."  
  
"Maybe..." he said, pulling one arm through his shirt and then the other. "...That's why I'm here. I can't tell yet." He finally looked up at his taller clone, his jaw set grimly. Even Larry wasn't used to seeing himself so serious, his voice even, his eyes weary, worried about something beyond the scope of the day ahead, the trouble he'd cause, the tail he'd chase. Beyond the scope of him. "Y'know?"  
  
Larry nodded. He knew.  
  
Larry Prime let out a breath he'd been holding the entire time. They let another strange, heavy silence settle between them while the older clone went about prepping himself for the day. Minutes passed. The taller Larry eventually slid off the bed and scuttled into the bathroom to make himself human this morning.  
  
He was supposed to be brushing his teeth, but he found himself struggling to concentrate long enough even for that. He kept catching himself staring into the sink, thoughts scrambling around in his head while the faucet droned on in the background. He couldn't even tell what he was thinking about - probably about their conversation, but he kept bouncing back and forth between the They Saids and the What Nows. The Hows, the Wheres and Whens. The Whose Faults. The Why Mes. He furrowed his brow into the porcelain. A lot of it was Why Me. Most of it was Why Me.  
  
Larry heard his phone give a cheery _ding!_ from the bedside table, and it was enough to at least get him to start brushing. This time in the morning, he had two guesses; Dick texting him to apologize for some kind of drunken debauchery from the night before, or a spam message. Both equally predictable.  
  
"I don't wanna drag someone into stuff I don't--" He heard Larry Prime blurt out from the main room. Larry stopped brushing his teeth and looked into the mirror to see his older self staring at him from the doorway, shifting uncomfortably, his hands shoved deep into his pockets. "I don't know how to fix."  
  
Larry Reboot emptied a mouthful of foam into the sink. "Why do you have to fix it?"  
  
"It feels like I put something dangerous out in the world." Larry Prime ground his teeth behind his lips. "I don't like it."  
  
Larry turned to him. "Me neither."  
  
"I figured." He said. Then, quietly, "Sorry."  
  
Larry blinked.  
  
"For not telling you in the first place."  
  
He smiled, a little. Sort of bitter, sort of sad. "I don't tell myself a lot of stuff."  
  
Larry Prime chuckled despite himself. "Glad we finally found something in common."  
  
"So..." The taller of the two put down his toothbrush and picked up his hairbrush instead. He leaned back against the counter and ran it through his hair a few times, sort of mindless. "...What now?"  
  
"No clue." Larry Prime looked away and smoothed down the gray hair on his temples out of reflex. Larry Reboot stopped brushing and flushed shamefully, ever so lightly. Figures he'd notice _this_ time. "I think I'm gonna go back down and see if there's papers about this thing. Now that we're sure nothing's down there."  
  
"Oh! That's smart. Of course a bunch of science-y whatever nerds are gonna keep reports." Larry nodded affirmatively and scooted past his shorter self on his way over to the bedside table. "I'll grab the remote! I bet we can find something good this time."  
  
"...Hey, uh." The older Larry held up a hand as his younger self turned back around, already mid-reach for the remote. "Don't worry about it."  
  
Larry blinked again.  
  
"I wanna go by myself this time."  
  
Larry knit his brow, half hurt and half relieved. "Really? That place is creep central."  
  
"Yeah." Larry Prime held his hand up expectantly and Larry Reboot obliged, tossing the remote deftly to his older self. _We should turn that into a party trick_ , they both thought but neglected to say. "I need to be alone with this problem for a bit, I think."  
  
"Yeah. Yeah! No, that makes sense." Larry noddled, his smile still a little worried. "Guess I'll have to go make my own trouble today."  
  
"Go chase some of those pretty girls you keep going on about." The older Larry grinned and turned on his heel towards the door. "You told me you know lots of 'em!"  
  
"I did? I did. Uh, I _do!_ " Larry put his hands on his hips and pouted incredulously. "I will!"  
  
Larry Prime gave a short, high laugh from the doorway. "Go get 'em, tiger! You'll have to show me the spoils later." He waggled his fingers at him as he slipped past the door. "Toodles!"  
  
_Click._  
  
Larry stood in the empty room with his hands on his hips a little longer. He couldn't quite figure out the sincerity-to-backhand ratio on that last exchange, and after a few moments of grumbling to himself he decided that he didn't care enough to worry about it right now. Instead, he scuttled over to the closet to figure out his outfit for the day - as if it would be any different than yesterday's, and as if he owned anything but several rows of white polyester suits. He liked to tell himself that some of them were wider in the shoulders than others.  
  
He made it all the way to pants before his phone threw another chipper little _ding!_ at him. Oh, right, he should probably find out what Dick or the automated spam delivery system wanted this morning. He threaded one arm and then the other through his undershirt on his way back to the bed, and unlocked his phone to see...  
  
...A flash sale on high quality Chinese graphics cards, made in Taiwan! Today only!  
  
Larry rolled his eyes and swiped the message off into the void. He supposed the next one would be Dick asking if Larry had found his keys after he threw them at the accursed karaoke stage last night in a fit of drunken rage (he had).  
  
Except...

  
**_Nari U ´ᴥ` U_ **  
_10:06 AM_  
_ <[   Heya pup! （*＾ワ＾*）I finished your tail!! Wanna come over later?   ]_

  
Larry's heart nearly fluttered into his throat. He didn't think there was a third option! He slid open his text app and clumsily blasted through a reply as fast as he could.

  
**_Me_**  
_10:40 AM_  
_< [   yes please c:  I'll cme by at 6  ]_

  
He set the phone face down on the bed next to him and kicked his feet impatiently while he waited for a response. He knew what it was going to be, but somehow it didn't make the wait any easier. Somehow it made it worse. He wrung his hands and smiled gleefully into the empty room. It felt like an eternity, but he knew it was coming any minute. Any second. Soon, soon, soon. Soon soon soon soon s--  
  
_Ding!_  
  
Larry scrambled for his phone like it was a bomb. It took him several swipes to actually unlock it this time, because he was _far_ too excited for motor skills. He rushed to his text app to check what he already knew was there, but needed to see for himself.  
  
  
**_Nari U ´ᴥ` U_**  
_10:45 AM_  
_ <[   Good boy!   ]_


	6. Good Boy!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's finally here! The EXPLICIT rating! It's real!! People fuck!!!!
> 
> Less exciting: I combined what were formerly chapters 5 + 6 into a single chapter 5, because it all takes place on the same day and it felt like a weird separation.
> 
> This chapter is so long! There's so much pet play. I'm sorry and also you're welcome, I can't tell which. All the art in this chapter is mine, because drawing this idiot on repeat counts as self care right now.

There was almost nothing left. Larry sat dejected in a corner of the sewer lab's hidden room, surrounded by stacks of papers that were mostly scraps. He picked up a stray, ragged sheet and flipped it back and forth a few times. From the few sentences still legible, he decided it wasn't related to any renegade clones, and set it on top of a pile to his left before picking up another page. All the pages he had found were tattered, most beyond legibility, and strewn across all corners of the lab. It was like a tornado had run through, but Larry had an awful itching feeling that this was something more focused than disaster. Whatever had escaped, it was hellbent on making sure it would be for good.

He sighed and pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. He meant it when he said that he wanted some time alone with the problem...but he'd be lying if he denied part of it being embarrassment. He didn't want to deal with his younger self of several decades teasing him over needing reading glasses nowadays. He certainly would've done the same at that age.

Larry leaned back against the wall and looked at the sky peaking through the sewer grate above him, already coloured with faint strips of sunset hues. A thick pane of one-way glass protected the lab underneath from the Lost Wages weather. He wondered briefly how no one noticed that the drains outside of Lefty's always flooded over, before nodding to himself and deciding that it was pretty par for the course.

He picked up one last sheet of paper and flipped it over a couple times. When it disintegrated into fine confetti in his hands, Larry decided that he'd had enough. He blew an aggravated puff of air through his nose and stood up, grabbing his pitifully thin pile of reports he had deemed relevant and wincing through all of complaints from his back as he bent over. He'd been scraping around in this piece of shit sewer system for hours. _Hours._ And all he had to show for it was a pile of scraps - all of which probably amounted to one legible paragraph. He pushed his glasses up to rest on top of his head as he made his way back to the elevator. Stupid. Useless.

This time of day was about the only point where anyone could call Lost Wages "beautiful", and even that would be a stretch. Larry was in too bad of a mood to notice the gentle pinks and blues scattered across the surrounding facades, the harsh sunset shadows stretching long to the east, or even the great vibrant streaks painted across the sky. He didn't give a shit. He was tired. He was frustrated. His suit was _ruined_ with sewer scum. Larry made a beeline towards Lefty's door, eyes locked on his feet. Fuck it. Fuck the whole thing.

The little bell on the door jingled brightly, catching Lefty's attention and the best customer service face he could muster...until he saw who it was. "Oh, I wondered where you ran off to."

Larry tossed his pile of papers onto the bar and began his bold struggle to reach the top of a stool. It felt especially Sisyphean today, and by the time he finally got all three-foot-something of him seated on top he was wearing a particularly deep scowl. "Is my tab still closed?" he sort of grumbled, sort of growled.

Lefty's last good eye looked him up and down, and eventually he gave a little sigh. "Don't say I never did anything for ya," he said, tapping out a mug of the usual Barbarian Brew. "Whatcha doing with that trash?"

"We hit a snag with this cloning junk," Larry grumbled, one hand to his temple. "A big stupid stinkin' dirty snag, and this pile o' crap's the only info I've got on it."

"That sucks," Lefty said with as much sympathy as he could muster for a man who owed him thirty years worth of drinks, plus one. He set Larry's mug down with a gentle _tink_ of glass, but didn't let go quite yet. He squinted his eye as he searched his old friend's face. "...Since when did you need those?"

"Need what?"

Lefty tapped his forehead.

Larry touched his own, trailing his hand up until he found the glasses he had forgotten on top of his head. "Oh."

"Heh. Twinsies!" Lefty finally released Larry's drink and used the hand to pat the breast pocket where he kept his own pair. "Can't believe we're gettin' this old, buddy."

"Urgh," Larry slid his glasses back down to his nose and picked up one of his sheets. "I don't wanna think about it."

The door jingled again, but Lefty waited until he saw who entered before putting effort into the customer service face this time. "Oho, welcome back!"

"Hey Lefty. I think you've got a keg for me."

Larry lifted his face out of his papers as he recognized a woman's voice, floating somewhere next to him, far above his head.

"Sure do. I'll go roll it out for ya."

Lefty disappeared into the other room, and Larry finally looked to his side.

A goddess. A true, chiseled _goddess_ was standing next to him, _towering_ over him. Her hoodie lay across her only half-zipped, revealing broad shoulders glistening with a thin layer of post-workout sweat. She leaned over and braced her arms on the bar as she waited for Lefty's return, and Larry watched in wide-eyed wonder as her muscles flexed like beautiful machinery under ebony skin. He always felt short in the first place, but next to this towering Adonia he was microscopic. He was nothing. He loved it. He loved her. He was in love. A horny, wavering sigh escaped his lips, and then she looked at him.

He froze. They both froze. She looked at him with a face that read revulsion at first, then surprise, then curiosity. "Do we..." she wagged her hand at him while she tried to piece things together. "Have we met?"

"Nope," Larry smiled coyly and adjusted his glasses. "Cuz I'd never forget you if we did, baby!"

Revulsion again, then suddenly understanding. "You don't happen know a guy named Larry, do you?"

Fuck. Oh god. _Oh_ fuck. He knew he recognized her from somewhere. His big jackass idiot clone had showed him a photo of her on that stupid plane. Larry forced out something between a grimace and a smile. "Aw, man. Am I that obvious?"

"A little," she laughed, and Larry almost melted into a puddle. If only he could get her to do that again, he could die happy. "Only a Laffer would pull a line on me like that. So..." she rolled her hand. "Dad? Uncle?"

Double fuck. He didn't want to run her off with the weird details of being some kind of funky science clone. "D-d-d-d-" Well, okay, if that was the first syllable his brain decided to spit out then he'd just have to roll with it. "Dad! Yup, his dad. That's me." He held out a genial hand to her. "My name's Larry...Larry Laffer? Uh, senior! Eheh."

"A Larry Laffer lineage, huh?" She chucked and gave his hand a single, strong shake. She touched him, and that was it. He could die now. He wished she would just skip the pretense and punch a hole through his face. "Diana. I'm a friend of your little Larry, but I don't know if he told you about me."

He shook his head vigorously, setting his nose cartoonishly a-wobble. "Nope, but he should know better than to keep gorgeous women away from me! I'll give him a sound whuppin' later."

Lefty barreled back into the room, rolling an impressive steel keg in front of him. "Heeeere ya go, miss. One big batch of Lefty's Extra Lightning Advanced Power Protein Formula!" He stood the keg next to Diana and shuffled back behind the bar to the register. "Hope that trademark comes through soon, I'm worried someone's gonna swipe my name."

"Thanks Lefty," Diana fished a card out of her wallet and he quickly went about taking her money. "Everyone at the gym is _nuts_ about this stuff. I don't know how you do it!"

"Definitely not with a washing machine!" Lefty definitely lied, returning her card. "D'you need help getting that out?"

"Nope."

Diana squatted down and, in one swift motion, heaved the keg onto one shoulder. Larry nearly jizzed himself into a coma. He wanted her to choke him to death with both hands. "Oh, is there a gym nearby?" He managed to squeak out, crossing his legs in a way he hoped looked casual and not at all just an attempt to hide the tent he was pitching. "I was just wondering where I was gonna work out while I'm visiting the boy."

Diana gave him a humoured but doubtful smile. " _You_ work out?"

"Of course! Can't you tell?" He rolled up one of his sleeves to reveal absolute proof that the only working out he ever did was getting off. Lefty huffed through his mustache and busied himself by looking through Larry's pile of papers before he said anything to add to the embarrassment.

Diana laughed again - a short mocking bark, but he didn't mind. God, why didn't she just kill him already? "Well, that's already better than my Larry! You should drop by, I'll give you a free sesh. I'm pretty sure I owe your kid a favour."

Larry nearly fell out of his chair. Oh my god, a _session!_ He hoped it included murder. "Aaaabsolutely! You're as generous as you are beautiful, baby. That son o' mine's a lucky guy!"

"Oh, he is." She smiled kindly at him, but Larry felt something sharp and horrible pierce his heart. He gaped at her, frozen, and before he could push his glasses back up the bridge of his nose she leaned in a little too close and did it for him. "I'll see you there, little boy."

She turned towards the door and left him staring into space, his glasses slipping back down his face but too preoccupied to correct them. The bell jingled again as she exited, hitting his ear like an angel's laugh. "Oh...Lefty..." He brought both hands to his chest, his voice wobbling dangerously. "Ohhh Lefty...I think this is heaven. I think I'm in love."

"Again?" Lefty held the tattered end of one sheet closely to his good eye. Curious.

"Again." Larry gave another sigh, a little tired and a lot horny. A slow, creeping grimace began to form on his face over the next few seconds.  "Ohh god...Lefty...she thinks I'm my _dad_."

Lefty slid his finger over one of the little holes littering the papers. It was perfectly square - they all were - like someone had taken a hole punch to these reports a million times. "I hate it when that happens."

"Lefty oh my god I told her I'm my dad."

"Mhmm."

"Lefty. Oh my _god_."

"These remind me of something." Lefty set the sheets down and ducked under the bar to rummage around. A minute of gently clacking knick-knacks later, he reappeared and set something on the counter next to Larry.

_Clink. Clinkity-tink clink. Clink tink. Tink._

Whatever was making that noise was enough to annoy Larry out of his own crisis. He spun his stool back to the bar to see a mason jar sitting on the counter, containing...something? Larry set his chin flush with the counter and squinted into the jar. "What's this have to do with anything?"

"You notice the weird way these papers are chewed up?" Lefty tapped the stack of reports. "It's not torn or nothing, it's just punched with all these little squares. Made me think of this thing I found in the back alley."

Larry looked at the stack in front of them, then squinted harder into the jar. There was a layer of mysterious material sitting at the bottom, but something about it didn't feel right. It was less like a puddle and more like a flat texture stuck to the base of the jar. It was made of a mosaic of vague peachy-brown skin tones and had strange, hard edges. when Larry tapped the glass it did not wobble or move like any sort of liquid. The puddle - for lack of a better word - was constantly fizzling, emitting perfect little square pixels that floated to the top of the jar and blipped against the glass with a gentle tinkling sound. "What...even is this?"

Lefty shrugged. "Dunno. Years n' years ago I found a big ol' puddle of it out back while I was takin' out the trash, so I kept some of it."

Larry tentatively grabbed the jar with both hands and tilted it to the left. The puddle crawled up the side of the glass in blocky spurts, in a way that reminded him of the games he used to program in a career several lifetimes ago. "When did you say you found this thing?"

"Oh lord, this was _ages_ ago. It's been decades."

"How many decades?"

Lefty stroked his mustache pensively. "Three? That sounds right." He nodded to himself. "Oh yes, that must be right. That's when I was still fighting that health and safety complaint."

 _Thirty years_ , Larry mouthed silently to himself, staring intently at the strange material in his hands. He glanced at the papers again, and then back at the jar. The tiny pixels fizzing out of the odd puddle matched the holes that peppered all of the reports he had found. Right place, right time, right stuff. He decided it was too much when a weird chill settled over his shoulders, and he finally put the jar down. "Hey, uh, I dunno when my lesser half is gonna be back, but can you show him this thing when he gets in?"

"Sure, but don't expect me to give it to either of you. That's my lucky Jar-Full-Of-Freaky-Mystery-Waste!"

"Course not. What kind monster would I be to steal a man's freaky mystery waste?"

Lefty took the jar off the counter and returned it to its lucky Jar-Full-Of-Freaky-Mystery-Waste post behind the bar. "So...that help you at all?"

Larry took a long pause.

"I don't know."

 

* * *

 

"Honestly? I'm just mad you haven't taken me to meet this other guy."

"Well I'm not exactly chomping at the bit to get everyone involved."

"Why not? You've got a _clone!_ Do you get how cool that is??" Nari smiled brightly over the excitement of being stuck in a bad sci-fi plotline. "If I had another me I'd rub it in _everyone's_ face. Think of all the level grinding I could get done!"

"It's nothing I wanna show off to _anyone_ , thanks." Larry grumbled from her lap. "That guy's a little prick. And he doesn't look anything like me!"

"Then how's he your clone?" Nari tapped the mic on her headset. "Hey, are we going or what?"

From outside her headphones, Larry heard a faint chorus of _"wait a minute"_ s and _"gimme a sec"_ s. He frowned into the fabric of her shirt. "He just is. Like, everything else is the same." He gave something between a whine and a sigh. "I dunno. It's complicated."

"Don't get your undies in a bunch, pup," She reached down to skritch at the nape of his neck, and Larry let a much softer sigh escape his lips. "It's not a big deal."

Nari was wrong and it was _definitely_ a big deal, but he didn't have any room to talk back while her fingers were scrambling his brain. He hummed low and leaned back into her touch as Nari slipped underneath his collar to scratch a particularly good spot. The little metal tag hanging off one the loops jingled pleasantly, melting all of the stress off his shoulders. If it was a big deal, it could be a big deal later.

When she removed her hand he scooted up through the loop her arms made while holding the controller, pressing his chest flush against hers. He hummed again and kissed softly along her jawline, and Nari giggled and nuzzled her cheek into his. "Aww see, there you go! What a good boy you are." Larry responded with some sort of wobbly noise from the back of his throat and buried his face into the crook of her neck.

After a few pleasant moments, he heard faint talking from several new voices on the other side of her headphones. "Alright pup, that's my cue."

She gently pushed Larry off of her chest, to which he responded with a pitiful " _Nuhhhhhhh_ " and an attempt to latch on again. She pushed him a little harder this time. "I know, buddy. I'll give you _lots_ of attention after this, promise."

"Hey, are you ready or what?" a voice buzzed in her ear.

Larry frowned at her. "Naaaariiiiiii."

She ruffled his hair and sighed, a little frustrated. "Larry, down."

He made a small whining noise and waggled his hips a little, just enough to swish his tail around expectantly.

"Larry. _Down._ "

With a dejected grunt, Larry scooted back out through her arms and rolled onto the bed. Nari finally tapped her mic on again. "Yeah sorry, I'm here! We're going to the mine near the taiga, right? Where we found the stronghold?" A pause while someone spoke on the other end of the line. "Nice! Okay, I should have enough on me for that already. Are e good?" Nari paused, then nodded affirmatively. "Cool, great. Let's go!"

Next to her, Larry rolled over onto his side and huffed. He had hoped Nari invited him over to be more than just a lapdog, but evidently that was his role tonight. This whole week sucked, and now this sucked. Larry frowned into the comforter.

He fiddled with the collar and listened to his name tag jingle, soft and soothing. It was Nari's idea first, but they were both surprised by how quickly Larry embraced the idea behind pet play. He had offered plenty of resistance at first, but that had quickly crumbled after his first designation as a Good Boy! - earned after allowing her to insert the goofy unicorn tail butt plug that he had gifted Nari in the first place several months before. It was all downhill from there.

"Heyy hey, watch out." He looked up at Nari, but she was just talking into the mic again. "Troy, there's a bunch of guys down that way." She paused, nodded. "Yeah, it probably down to gem level. We can clear it out after we find the stronghold."

Larry huffed. He rolled onto his other side and felt his own tail brush briefly against the bare skin of his ankle. He thought he had done a pretty good job of MacGuyvering this thing together the first time, but Nari's iteration had blown his slapdash handiwork out of the water. It was even longer, softer and more luscious than before. The faux horsehair had been dyed brilliant streaks of yellow, cyan and magenta, with peeks of the original white scattered throughout. Nari had taken great care to make sure it matched the way she dyed her own hair - an extra layer of ownership that was not lost on Larry.

Larry rubbed his fingers against the leather of his collar and sighed, the smallest hint of a smile forming. He had always thought of women as objects of desire...well, that didn't sound great when you said it like that. That made him sound sort of like an outdated chauvinist - which he wasn't, honestly, so much as he was chronically lonely and _desperately_ horny. He hummed pensively to himself and attempted to reword his thoughts, still tracing along the stitching. He had always been the one in pursuit, is the idea he was trying to get across. Anything with a feminine shape and a weak pulse was a new goal, a target to chase, a trophy to earn...a cave to spelunk, if all went to plan. She was the star, the centerpiece, and he was just some schmuck along for the ride.

But when he was here - when his collar was on and his tail was in, and he was laying half-naked next to the woman who had gifted them, who had looped the collar around his neck and fastened the buckle with her own gentle, slender hands - it was different. _He_ was the object of desire. _He_ was the trophy. He was a beloved pet to be adored and fawned over, the center of attention and affection. He flicked his hips in just the right way so that his tail swished through the air in a graceful arc before settling, soft and resplendent, across his body. When he adjusted his position his muscles clenched reflexively around the plug end of his tail - so much thicker, so much deeper than the one he had made before - and he let out a wobbly sigh, letting his legs tangle themselves in the soft, vibrant hair trailing behind. He thought he was beautiful. He was wrong, but that didn't matter.

"Hey Jeff, what're your coords?" Nari paused to let him talk, then frowned. "No dude, I'm not using your screen name." A longer pause. "I'm not gonna call you Cumlord69! How many times do I have to--" Sudden, excited chattering from her headset. "What? Oh."

Well, he was _supposed_ to be the the center of attention. Larry curled in on himself and balled his fists into the fabric of his tank top. No way, man. He wasn't about to play second fiddle to a gaggle of nerds and their dumb game about playing with blocks. He rolled over onto his front and got onto his hands and knees with a determined huff. _He_ was the trophy.

"Wrehh!"

Nari ignored him. Larry frowned. She usually loved that part of his version of pupspace - he was talkative, but he didn't actually do much talking. Instead he tended to fall into mostly wordless, vaguely animal noises. Chuffing, whining, grumbling...Nari always seemed sort of impressed by his vocal range. Last time he had discovered this strange little chirring noise he could make near the front of his throat and Nari had almost squealed in sheer delight, as if someone had plopped a box full of puppies right in front of her. It had quickly become his favourite.

"Chrrr."

It wasn't working this time. Nuts. Fine. Larry grumbled and scuttled around so that he was kneeling at Nari's feet, his body dipped low so that he didn't block her view of the screen and earn a swift kick to the head. He leaned in and nuzzled against her calf, testing the waters. No good reaction, but no bad one either. He brushed his hand tentatively against her ankle and did not receive a reprimand. Okay. He bent down lower and gently licked the pale skin on top of her foot.

"Oh my god??" Larry jumped a little, but the rapid clacking of buttons assured him that she was yelling at something else. "Where did all these skeletons come from! Is there a spawner in here?"

Larry looked over his shoulder at the screen sitting at the far end of the bed. She was right, that _was_ a lot of skeletons. But no amount of skeletons was more interesting than _him_ tonight, damnit. He gently parted her legs so he could crawl into her lap. He looked up at her and found no reaction on her face, but it didn't alleviate any of the tension. It felt like he was scaling a mountain. In reality Larry was only a few inches shorter than her, but Nari was _very_ good at making him feel **_very_** small.

He reached towards the band of her panties...but stopped, his fingers just centimeters away. Too much. Too soon. She'd just kick him off her lap again. Hell, she might kick him out of the room entirely. He had to be careful. Tactical. Like he was diffusing a bomb. His eyes flicked around as he considered better options, and then Nari fiddled absently with the collar of her shirt - several sizes too large for her thanks to some wonky English in the item description, but fine as pajamas. Larry figured you could probably fit two of her in there, and then it clicked.

Slowly, carefully, Larry slipped a trembling hand under the hem of her shirt and held it open _just_ enough to slip his head underneath. It was dark and warm, and would have been nice under different circumstances. Larry held his breath, his face flush against the soft skin of her stomach while he figured out his next steps. There was no way she didn't notice him in here, but she probably just thought he was being weird and a brat. She wasn't entirely wrong, to be fair.

At a very lucky moment Nari yelled something about getting cornered by zombies, and while she was distracted Larry took the opportunity to slide himself quickly into place. Suddenly he was face-to-face with her chest, and he knew that this was the time to do or die. He slid a careful hand up to cup one breast - a little small but still perfect, just as all breasts were in Larry Laffer's very correct opinion - and ever so gently squeezed. A finger briefly brushed over her nipple and he felt Nari adjust herself under him. He didn't know if that meant anything. He brought his pointer and thumb together and rolled them over gently, feeling her nipple go hard between them. When he curled in his other fingers and squeezed just a little tighter, Larry heard a soft shuddering sigh somewhere above him, muffled by the fabric between them. He finally let out the breath he had been holding from the beginning. Going places.

Emboldened, Larry brought his free hand up to cup the other boob. His fingers rolled over and around her nipple, a few curled under to squeeze and fondle at the soft skin under her breast, each time a little faster, a little rougher. Nari arched her back to push more of her into his hands, and Larry made some small noise between a grumble and a chuckle. He brought his fingers together a little harder, almost a pinch.

"Mmm..."

He felt Nari's body tense underneath him. "What?" Pause. Muffled chattering. "Nono, I didn't say anything! It's probably static. Did someone check that chest?"

He squeezed again, both hands at once now. Nari shook ever so slightly, but didn't make a sound. Larry frowned. Fine. He knew how to play games too.

Larry sacrificed one arm to wrap around Nari's waist and steady them both, before leaning in and pressing his face into the soft space between her breasts. He planted kisses on her now-abandoned right boob, travelling across in a gentle curve, and then Nari nearly jumped out of her skin when his tongue curled around her already erect nipple. Her hands shook on her controller, though Larry couldn't see it as he made loop after cruel loop, sometimes dragging the base of his tongue across, sometimes teasing the tip ever so lightly. But he _could_ feel her chest heave under him, and he _could_ hear the small, strained noises that she was valiantly fighting off. Part of him hoped the dorks on the other line heard them too. Part of him hoped they were jealous.

"I need...urgh," Nari took a deep, deep breath before she continued. "I need someone to check the upper path." She gritted her teeth while she waited out the reply. "No yeah, I'm fine! I'm just uh, nervous?" Pause. Another deep breath. "About having a Creepazoid drop on us! Uh-huh."

Larry felt an uncharacteristically wide grin creep across his face. Oh, he hoped they were _jealous_.

In one smooth motion he wrapped both arms around her waist and slid himself up so that he could hook his legs with hers, pressing their hips tightly together. He took her nipple whole into his mouth and growled low in the back of his throat, sending tingles up Nari's spine. The deep breaths weren't working anymore - if anything, they were producing a completely new and equally embarrassing array of noises. Larry bucked his hips and the bulge through his underwear ground roughly against the warm, wet spot on hers. Her nipples were already so hard it was painful, and his lips and tongue were torture on top of it, merciless.

"No...ohh...I mean yes!" She leaned into the pile of pillows behind her and tilted her head back, gritting her teeth at the ceiling. "Yes! We're using the north tunnel! We're...I'm..." He thrust their hips together again and she had no chance against the moan that escaped. Her face burned, agonizing. "I'm breaking up..." He closed his lips around her and dragged the tip of his tongue over the sensitive tip of her nipple, drawing out some high, strained noise that neither of them had heard before. "My connection's...ooh it's bad tonight. I've gotta...go..." Everything was moving faster. His mouth. His hips. _Her_ hips. "My ping is NOT fine!" she blurted out. Larry heard the buttons on her controller clacking frantically as she tried to remember how to back out of the game through a horny fog. "Sorry! Sorry!! I'll hop on the next one!" A sigh, a moan, and then a frustrated growl. "Yeah yeah I know sorry! Later, promise! _Promise!!_ Seeyaguyshaveagoodonebyyeeeee!"

There was a brief moment of faint, frantic chattering from the other side of the headset. Then, suddenly, there was nothing.

Click clack _thonk **BONK.**_ Nari's controller hit the ground. Her headset sailed halfway across the room as she flung it off her head in a fit of frustration. The shirt was off in record time - she almost tore the thing even wider in her rush to get it off.

" _YOU._ "

Larry stopped mid-thrust, his crotch squeezed tight against hers. He finally freed her boob and looked up at her with the widest, brightest puppydog eyes he could muster. She breathed heavily, her eyes on fire and her lips pressed into a thin line, and Larry balked - he had never seen her make that face, no matter how annoying he had been. He lowered his head submissively and waggled his tail.

"Chwrr?"

After several excruciating moments, Nari's mouth turned up into a small but sly smile. "You just want attention, huh pup?"

Larry nodded quickly. He did! He _did!_

"You _do!_ " Nari leaned over to reach into the bed stand drawer. "You're excited, huh puppy? You're _impatient._ "

Larry nodded again, ignoring the way she almost spit her last words at him. Yes, he _was_ impatient! He knew he'd get his point across eventually.

"You _are!_ Well, guess who's a lucky dog today?"

Was it him? It's gotta be him. Larry grinned brightly and waggled even harder. It's him!! He's the lucky dog!!!

"Mhmm." After much rummaging, Nari finally found what she was looking for. She pulled her hand out of the drawer and held a small, pink device in front of Larry, who tilted his head at it quizzically. It was oblong, the size of her closed palm, and the only thing on it was a dial encircling the top. "Do you like your new tail, pup?"

He nodded eagerly.

"Uh-huhhh. I knew you would," she said, her voice sickly sweet. She reached forward to run her fingers through the bright, silky hair. "Do you know what I changed about it?"

Larry looked back at his tail, then back to her. He tilted his head and chirred inquisitively.

"Chrrwrrr?"

Nari pet his head with her other hand. "No, you should tell me."

Oh. "It's uh, longer now? It's bigger and fluffier." He looked down at the multicolour strands pooling over his legs. "And it's uh...deeper."

"Clever boy." She skritched under his chin and Larry let out a little hum of delight. "You missed one, though."

He pouted a bit, confused.

"I added a little something extra!" She sang, waving her strange remote around. "I think you'll like it..."

With her thumb, Nari clicked the dial to the first notch. "...Eventually."

Larry felt something spring to life inside of him, forcing out a surprised yelp and sending him scrambling off her lap and back onto the bed. He whined frantically while something foreign pulsed hard in his ears.

"Aww. Didn't mean to scare ya, pup." Nari twirled the remote between her fingers and leaned back into the pillows behind her. He rolled onto his back and squirmed desperately, pathetically, drawing out a particularly smug smile from her. "You've never had a vibe in before, huh?"

A what? Larry curled around to look at the tail lodged deep inside of him, vibrating steadily at the base. Oh god, it _was_ a vibe. She was right; this was new, and maybe a little scary. Each pulse made his muscles clench tightly around the thick, ribbed plug lodged deep, _deep_ inside of him. Larry tried to force words out of his throat, but they all died in the air.

"I'm pretty happy with this thing! You can do a lot of neat stuff with bluetooth these days..." She flicked her thumb across the dial, locking into another notch. "It's got all these different settings, too! How's this one?"

The sine wave shaking his body suddenly flipped, producing harsh peaks and lows that dragged a long, strangled moan out of him. He arched his back into the bed as his hips bucked and shook of their own accord. "N-Nari..."

"Hmmm~?" She slid the dial to another notch with one hand, the other gently stroking herself through her underwear while she watched him stretch and squirm in front of her.

The pattern flipped again, the pulse shorter and more insistent. Larry reached behind and balled his fists into the comforter, his body slowly dissolving into a pool of sweat. "Please," he gasped, "Nari... _please_..."

"I thought this was what you wanted!" She said in mock confusion, which would have been obvious if Larry's brain wasn't currently vibrating into another dimension. Her slender fingers pressed a little deeper against the fabric. "I'm giving you _lots_ of attention now."

He rolled his hips and hissed through his teeth. His cock twitched and strained against the confines of his underwear, so hard it was almost painful. He reached a single, shaking hand towards his crotch, but Nari caught his wrist like a vice before he could do anything.

" _Bad dog_ ," she said sternly, and Larry grit his teeth as he felt a single tear roll down the side of his face. A possessive hand slid under his shirt and crawled up his stomach, fingers tracing along the edge of his ribs. "You keep your hands to yourself."

Larry obediently clasped his hands in front of him, and Nari couldn't help but laugh. "There, just like that..." Her hand slipped back down across his stomach to his gaudy leopard print undies, the same dumb pattern he always wore. She slipped both hands into the waistband and started to shuffle them down his legs when an errant finger clicked the dial over another notch. He jumped from the sudden intensity, shaking, moaning, somehow arching his back into an even tighter curve. "Oops!" Nari giggled to herself and finally slipped his undies off his ankle. "My bad, puppy. I didn't even mean to do that one!"

Larry squeezed his eyes shut through the tears and clenched his jaw, turning whatever he was going to say into a strained whimper instead. She giggled at him again.

Nari encircled his cock with her fingers easily... _very_ easily, actually. She looked down at him with no small degree of pity. It had felt bigger while he was grinding against her earlier, but in the bright light of day he was so small that she was actually a little shocked, almost embarrassed. She closed her hand and his penis was smothered entirely, pulsing and twitching eagerly in the warm cave formed by her palm. There was no way she'd get anything out of penetration. There was no way _he'd_ get anything out of penetration. She wondered why he was so obsessed with the quest for PIV, when all it ever amounted to was tossing a hotdog down a hallway.

She closed her eyes briefly, and in that moment she could feel the faint pulse of his vibe travel through her fingers and up her wrist. That was okay. She could make this work.

Nari released his dick and wrapped her arms around his waist, rolling both of them over so that Larry was kneeling on top of her - not a hard feat, as Larry Laffer was not a large man by any means. His limbs shook horribly while he struggled to hold himself up, and when Nari reached out to stroke his arm he almost collapsed. "We're gonna help each other out," she cooed, reaching to shuffle her underwear down her legs. She put both hands on his hips and began to guide him carefully into place. The tip of Larry's cock met the entrance to her canal and he bucked his hips suddenly, desperate to get inside. "Ah-ah, not there." She reached under to grab his dick and guided him back out, receiving a pitiful _whiiiiiiine_ in return. Instead she lead him just a little farther up, so that the head of his cock bumped against her clit.

Nari closed her eyes. She held him there for a minute and let the vibrations roll through her, both of them silent besides the soft whirring of the vibrator and Larry's desperate, heavy breathing. That was kind of annoying, actually. She opened her eyes again and looked up to see him squirming and panting above her, his tongue lolling out of his mouth like a...well, like a dog. She supposed that was appropriate.Nari reached up to cradle his cheek and felt a thin trail of saliva dribble down the back of her hand. That would've been gross in any other circumstance, but she found it pretty endearing here.

"Nuhhhahrriiii..." he slurred, letting the weight of his head rest in her hand. "I wuhh...I wanna..." She stroked his cheek with her thumb and he whimpered, needy. "P-Please..."

"I _know_ , baby. C'mon..." She brought her hands back and placed them both on his hips again, pushing him up so that his cock slid through the soft embrace formed by her labia. Larry mumbled something soft and tired as she brought him up and then back again for one more pass, slowly, gently. "We're hotdoggin' it from here, pup."

It only took her a few times before she was able to pull back and have Larry pick up where she left off. Nari had to admit that she was pretty thankful for Larry's unwitting foreplay back there - this might have caused some friction otherwise. But she was already soaked as it were, so Larry's cock slid easily against her. Every time he pressed in the vibrations rumbled softly against her clit, drawing out a long and luxurious sigh. It was nice...but she wasn't sure she'd actually get anywhere. Nari gripped her remote and, with one swift motion, clicked the dial all the way over to the final notch.

The vibe sprung to life with an intensity that Larry could never have predicted, tearing a strangled moan from deep in his chest. There wasn't even a pulse anymore - just a harsh, continuous drone _thumpthumpthump_ ing mercilessly against his prostate. He dropped any sense of rhythm he may have had before and his hips pumped sporadically against Nari's plush folds, sending shockwaves through her body every time the head of his cock rutted against her clit. She hooked her arms around the back of Larry's neck and held on for dear life as he frotted against her, desperate, animal. Larry wrapped himself around her and pressed their bodies together tight as he could, Nari gasping and shaking as each thrust pushed her closer to the end.

"Good boy--" A particularly eager series of thrusts cut her off and pulled out another tight gasp, almost a squeak. One hand wrapped around the back of his head and she twisted her fingers into his hair. The tag on his collar jingled obnoxiously in her ear, but it wasn't enough to stop the inevitable. "Oh god, good boy! Like that-- like _that!_ Right there. Oh _god_ Larry you're such a good boy."

 _Good boy_ , he mouthed silently into the crook of her neck. He squeezed his eyes shut as a telltale shake started in the soles of his feet. _Good boy. Good boy. Good boy. Good boy. Good boy._

He sputtered. He shook. The tail plug, unknowing and merciless, pounded him through an orgasm so strong he saw stars. It felt like his whole body was the vibrator. Larry pressed his hips _hard_ into Nari's, and the waves travelling through him were enough to tip her over the edge shortly after.

Larry finally collapsed, rolling off Nari and onto his back next to her. He whimpered softly while his tail continued to buzz inside of him. He wished this thing knew when to quit. Nari was taking her good, sweet time floating around in afterglow.

"Wrrreehh- _eehhh_..."

Nari gave a fluttery sigh and patted around for the remote, which had been abandoned somewhere off to the side. She found it eventually - thank god - and finally clicked the vibe off. "Heh. Sorry."

Larry finally exhaled. Oh god, it felt so good to sit still. Nari scooted closer to him and held open her arms, and he scooted over into her embrace. "D'you like your new tail?" she asked, stroking his hair.

He had to think about it, actually. After a long silent moment, he finally looked up at her and gave a single, small nod.

Nari smiled warmly and planted a single kiss on his forehead. "Good boy."

He nuzzled his head into the warm space under her chin and made a strange, contented trilling noise up near the front of his throat.

"Oooh, pup! That's a new one," she giggled, skritching the back of his neck in exactly the right spot. His collar jingled pleasantly in his ears. "It's cute! I like it."

Larry smiled, exhausted but happy. He flicked his hips in just the right way for his beautiful tail to make a long, luxurious arc and settle softly across his body.

"Trrrllrll~!"


	7. Strike Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> No one does The Sex in this chapter! Don't worry, it's just a bridge to pave the way for next time when Larry Laffer fucks a married man.
> 
> I know that Larry Prime's canonical personal soundtrack would actually be rows and rows of overplayed KC and The Sunshine Band songs, but for one beautiful second we're all going to pretend that he and we have any taste. It's Funkadelic or bust, baby.
> 
> More maintenance: I combined chapters 3 + 4 into a single entity, because having several small chapters floating around was starting to get on my nerves.

Larry bobbed his head to the sweet, smooth baseline floating from other Larry's modest bedside speaker. Just like with every other struggle in his life, Funkadelic was the only thing getting him through the absolute slog of piecing together the bits and scraps of information left over from the lab. He held a sheet closer to his glasses and used his free hand to jot down the few legible words in a small notepad, before setting it aside. There were only a couple of sheets left, and a few things were finally starting to come together - though maybe not for the better. In a mood, Larry swiped open his phone and tapped the album back to the first track. The music stopped, and a sharp raking noise briefly took its place before petering out into a low, bassy drone.  
  
_**Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time**_  
  
_**For y'all have knocked her up**_  
  
_**I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe**_  
  
_**I was not offended**_  
  
_**For I knew I had to rise above it all**_  
  
Larry smiled to himself,  
  
_**Or drown in my own shit**_  
  
albeit bitter. God, Maggot Brain was such a good album.  
  
He was in the middle of scrutinizing another page when a sharp _ratat-tat-rap_ sounded off from the other side of the door, accompanied by the sharp jingling of keys. "What's the password?" Larry called out.  
  
"Ken sent me!" his own voice answered.  
  
"Yup." Larry Prime hid away his reading glasses just before Larry Reboot finally entered, taking care to lock the door behind him. "You know this is _your_ place now, right? Like, you can just come in now?"  
  
The taller Larry paused, looked at the keys in his hand, then shrugged noncommittally before tossing them in the general direction of his side table. "Force of habit."  
  
Larry Prime shrugged as well. Fair enough.  
  
Larry hummed to himself and began to thread his arms out of his suit jacket, scooting over to the other side of the room to drape it over an abandoned chair near the closet. He figured it could last another day, or two, or five before he had to toss it in the wash. He unbuttoned his shirt collar and nodded as the beat picked up from the speakers. "God, Maggot Brain was such a good album."  
  
The older of the two grimaced and turned the volume down to a low hum, actually. Hearing the mirror parrot back his thoughts was kind of wigging him out tonight. "How'd it go in the outside world?"  
  
Larry shuffled off his shoes and plopped himself onto the love seat, slinging his legs over one arm and propping his head up against the other. He folded his hands on his stomach and pursed his lips while he parsed how much of tonight's petscapade he actually wanted to talk about...before deciding the answer was actually none. "It went!" He gave a wobbly chuckle and crossed his arms behind his head. "Nothing that exciting. Wandered around. Stopped by Caesar's Phallus. The ushe."  
  
The smaller Laffer squinted at him from his spot on the bed - perhaps not surprisingly, he could tell when he was lying. Their gaze met briefly and Larry Prime bit his lip as he recognized a very particular look to his clone's face; a mild but self-satisfied little smirk, a sort of mist in his eyes from a distant fire...you know, he had mostly been joking when he had told him to go chase down a girl while _he_ mucked around in the sewers. Larry resisted the urge to roll his eyes. Lucky dog. "Neat."  
  
"Did you, uh..." Larry Reboot waved a hand towards his clone's battle station. "Find anything fun down there?"  
  
"Enough sewer scum to ruin a suit," he tapped his notepad with the end of his pencil. "And a little info on our runaway experiment. Did Lefty show you the thing?"  
  
"What, the little jar full of stuff? Yeah, that was really weird. I'm not into how it was, like, fizzing?" He made an upwards wiggling motion with his fingers. "I dunno why you'd hold on to a jar of creepy sludge for thirty years."  
  
"Yeah, well I'm glad he did," Larry Prime waved a few of the collected sheets at him. "Cuz I'm pretty sure it's got to do with a little something else that happened thirty years ago."  
  
Larry uncrossed his arms and scooted himself around to sit up. Light as he was, the loveseat's worn out springs still groaned underneath him. "Really?"  
  
"Take a look," Larry patted the stack of papers next to him and his taller self wandered over to see. He picked up a sheet and flipped it around a few times, holding it up to the light overhead and squinting, puzzled, at the way it had been ripped apart. "I found all this stuff in the lab, and I think Lefty's weird sludge is what tore it up," the older clone tapped his notes. "And I think it came out of our missing friend."  
  
"Gross..." Larry traced a finger around the perfect pixel chunks missing from the paper.  
  
"Super gross, and _super_ inconvenient," he pulled his notepad _way_ too close to his face to check his writing, then handed it over to his clone. He wasn't about to blow the cover off his poor vision yet. "But I think I pieced enough scraps together to get a little info."  
  
The taller Larry tilted his head at the pad and flipped the first page over and back. "That's not much to work with."  
  
Older Larry scowled and crossed his arms over his chest. "Yeah, well _you're_ welcome to spend a day down there and see how far _you_ get! Just read the damn thing."  
  
"Uh..." Larry squinted into the notes. "Security breach. Something projects found. Unsalvageable. Clone program compromised. Necessary equipment something..." He tilted his head. "Broken maybe? The thing I crawled out of looked kinda beat up. Huhhh..." He ran his finger around the page until he found his place again. "Unable to proceed. Floppies missing."  
  
" _Floppies missing_ ," Larry Prime waggled a finger at him. "That's big, man."  
  
Larry scratched his head. "...Is it?"  
  
"It _is!_ That's from back during this thing with PornProdCorp! Lemme fill you in," Larry waved his hands to set the stage. "So while I was running around doing that whole thing, _these_ things go missing. They get _stolen_ ," a bitter sneer crossed his face. "By this slimy piece o' work called Biggs, in a big mess of corporate espionage that leaves me missin' a chunk of my memory."  
  
The younger Larry looked at him like he had grown another head. "I...what? That's not how that works."  
  
"It is if all your bits and pieces are stored on a bunch of floppies in some subterranean mad science lab," he motioned to the ground. "Every me they pumped out after that heist had a whole year of memories just.. _poof!_ Totally missing."  
  
"Ooh..." It took him a second for the idea to register, but eventually Larry gave him a small grimace. "That's scary."  
  
"Real scary," Larry nodded. "Well, scary afterwards, when I remembered enough to know that it was scary. I was missing a  _lot,_ man. I couldn't even recognize my own girl's face."  
  
"Yikes." Pause. His eyes suddenly went wide in fear. "Wait...girl in what context?"  
  
"Like, girlfriend girl."  
  
Larry let out the breath that had lodged in his throat. Now _that_ was scary. "...I had a girlfriend?"  
  
Larry Prime looked up at him with what started as surprise and bit of insult, but his face quickly softened into something else. Pity, and then some implacable, quiet sadness. "You...don't know about Patti."  
  
Larry Reboot shook his head. "Should I?"  
  
Pause. Larry Prime swallowed loudly and replaced whatever those words were going to be with a somewhat nervous laugh. "Nah, not really."  
  
He frowned, but didn't pry. Larry knew himself well enough to know that if he wasn't talking about a girl, there was a _very_ good reason for it. He found his spot on the notes again. "Uhh...something repairs something. Stress test something. Functioning for most part," his eyes widened for a moment. "Unexpected results. Anomaly?"  
  
"Number Four!" Larry Prime nodded quickly at him. "And I've got this theory, right? I think when they saw that thing pop out, they replaced as much missing stuff as they could before pumping out more of me. That's why there's just the one!"  
  
"Requires further investigation. Form is erratic. Unstable...something and something out of existence," he furrowed his brow, confused. "What's that word? Uhh...produces something something pixels, fluctuating between solid and aeriform. Little control over flow or direction. Capable of something with exceptional force." He flipped the page over, where there were a scant few words remaining. "Mood and something unpredictable. Requires additional security."  
  
They looked at each other. Larry Prime nodded again, smaller this time.  
  
"Uncontrollable. Escape, something attempt. Something something with otherwise inadvisable force."  
  
Larry breathed in,  
  
"Accident. Vicious."  
  
and closed the notepad.  
  
"Dangerous."  
  
The silence that followed was agonizing, frankly. Most of it was information they already knew, or at least had some idea of - but there was something different about having it all laid out on front of them, straight from the source. The last scraps of something that was outside now, with them.  
  
"I don't know how this helps," the taller Larry shook his head. "We still don't know where it is."  
  
"We...know what to look out for?" he said, running his hand idly over the shreds of paper sitting at his side. Had he really accomplished anything down there? Larry Prime pursed his lips and let the idea roll around in his head. "Maybe it's not help so much as confirmation, y'know?"  
  
Larry sighed and tossed the notebook back onto the bed. "I guess."  
  
"Not that I feel _better_ or anything. Centered maybe," shorter Larry uncrossed his legs and flopped backwards onto the somewhat ratty comforter. "I just think...like, if I'm gonna be looking over my shoulder, I wanna make sure what's chasing me is real."  
  
Taller Larry set his hands on his hips and stood with the idea for a second. "I _guess._ "  
  
"Either way, anything that made time to do this much shredding on the way out probably didn't stick around," Larry Prime gathered up his work and slid off the bed to go stuff them away in his suitcase. "Which means it's nowhere around here, and isn't my problem yet. Maybe it'll be one for Future Larry."  
  
"Future _Larrys_ ," his other self added, sticking out his tongue. "It's _my_ weird science murder clone too, y'know."  
  
"True! Tell you what, I'll give you custody on weekends and holidays."  
  
Taller Larry's phone _ring-ding_ 'd at him from his pocket, just in time. "You're a jerk," he said, and his shorter clone twiddled his fingers at him mockingly as Larry picked up the call. "Heya Dick."  
  
"Larry! Hey, uh...you been on Farcebook lately?"  
  
"No?" Larry scratched his chin. "I got tired of it a couple weeks ago. I think you were right when you said not to follow family."  
  
"Told you! I've been off it for a while too. I just hopped on to check a message today and, well..." The sound of Dick audibly hissing through his teeth on the other end. "You may wanna do some cleanup on your profile."  
  
Larry blinked. "Sorry?"  
  
"I think Pi's been listening in, babe. Did you switch your privacy settings?"  
  
"Huh? No, Pi was patched out a couple weeks ago..." There was still a little wobble to his voice - it had been an overnight update, and one morning she had simply stopped snarking at him. His life had been strangely quiet without her around to put him down, and it bothered him in a way that was more profound than he could have expected. Larry set Dick to speaker and went to open up his Farcebook app. He wondered if it was silly to miss a piece of software so much.  
  
"Yeah, but they put in a new version. PiToo's got some, uh...weird features so far."  
  
"What?" Larry's Farcebook profile finally loaded, and he immediately gripped his phone so hard that he almost broke it straight in half. "WHAT?!"  
  
Larry Laffer didn't exactly keep a squeaky-clean image, but the several dozen new posts over the last week were a disaster. Bits and pieces from his conversations had been strung into jumbles of words, then thrown onto his public Farcebook feed. Sometimes they had even posted a blurry and potentially incriminating photo, and _all_ of them had the location attached. Some posts were mundane ( _ham cheese uh uh yes uh lettuce uh tomato no toasted olives please other card uh coupon_ ), but most of them had somehow picked up on the most salacious moments possible. He couldn't tell if these had been recording before or after any given sexcapade, but either way it had managed to create rows and rows of the most embarrassing words possible. The most recent post was from just two hours ago, and the amount of dirty verbiage mixed with mentions of puppies made his face flush so hot he thought his hair would catch on fire. "Oh my god?" Larry squeaked out through the hand plastered over his mouth. "Dick oh my _god_."  
  
"Yeah, it's..." Dick paused awkwardly. "I promise I only read a couple of them."  
  
"Oh my god Dick my _mom_ follows me!" Larry shuffled his feet frantically as he scrolled through his timeline of debauchery. "What do I do??"  
  
"Delete the posts?"  
  
"Well then it's just gonna do it again! How do I turn that off?"  
  
"Oh, I don't know. I've got a Spamdroid, I just heard about this Pi stuff from a friend."  
  
Larry was already deleting posts as fast as he could. In his frantic tapping he accidentally boosted a particularly spicy one ( _baby there oh yes yes please cuffs god fuck me strap yes with strap punish me yes please I'm bad_ , accompanied by a photo that was not blurry enough to hide that it was his bare ass) to the top of his feed, and a shrill scream escaped through his teeth."Dick I'm gonna throw this thing out the window. I'm gonna flush it down the toilet."  
  
"Neither of those, please. You've gotta calm down, alright? Maybe I can Goggle it."  
  
"Hey hey," Larry Reboot felt a brief tap on his leg, and looked down to see Larry Prime waggle his own phone at him. "Gimme that. I've got a PiThing."  
  
Larry narrowed his eyes at him. "Do I trust you not to make this worse?"  
  
"You'd better, unless you wanna send Mama Laffer some more incriminating photos," Larry Prime waggled his hand expectantly, and Larry Reboot tentatively handed it over. "Dick! Fancy meeting you here, my man."  
  
There was an awkward silence at the end of the line. "...Oh! Oohh right, there's two of you. I thought one of us going nuts for a second."  
  
"No more than usual!" Larry tapped open a menu and began scrolling through the labyrinthine settings screen. "Don't sweat it, buddy. I've got this fire under control."  
  
A sigh of relief from the other end of the line. "Oh good, I don't know if I could make my way around a PiPhone even _with_ directions. I might be even worse than him with that thing!" Dick chuckled on the other end, and Larry Reboot gave a defiant little pout. "Thank you, Larry."  
  
"Okay, now say that again but slower."  
  
"What?"  
  
"I said you're welcome! Seeya around."  
  
The phone _beep-boop_ 'd quietly as the call ended. Larry Prime tapped around for another minute as his clone wrung his hands together anxiously. Eventually he sussed out the right setting (hidden at the bottom of the menu in an only somewhat tangentially related section, of course), tapped exactly once, and then returned the phone to himself. "You remember where this thing is, alright? Just in case it decides to start putting your intimates on blast again."  
  
"Thanks," Larry gave a small nod, holding his phone in a way that struck his older clone as strange. Gentle, almost cradling it. "Man...Pi would never have done that to me."  
  
"Mine might've," the shorter Larry added with a small and somewhat bitter laugh. "I ended up turning it off eventually. We weren't on good terms."  
  
"I mean, she wasn't _super_ into me either," he said, a sentence all too familiar to him. Taller Larry plopped down on the end of the bed "But I never would've...turned her _off_. It felt like she was my friend."  
  
Larry Prime wasn't sure whether it was pity or jealousy burning a hole in the front of his brain. Of course this weirdo would find a way to make friends with everything, _including_ a folder full of code. "Yeah, well," he gave a stiff shrug before returning to his spot on the love seat. "Hopefully her successor learns to quit posting your dick pics."  
  
"Yeah…jeez, there's so many of these," Larry Reboot sighed from deep in his chest, and began the arduous process of deleting the Farcebook fallout.  
  
The shorter Larry snuggled into the perfectly-sized space between both arms of the love seat and whipped out his own PiDevice. Now, what was that number he saw on his other half's phone…? Oh, of course; it was the Lost Wages area code, followed by some numbers in the order of a jingle he knew, and didn't it end with a four? No no, a three. Ah yes, that was it. Larry opened up a new tab and shot off a single text.

**_Me_ **  
_10:45 PM_  
_< [   Strike three   ]_


	8. Think of Me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tyler, The Creator: "I Like Girls, I Just End Up F*cking My Doppelganger's Gay Friend Every Time."
> 
> I'm very happy that I got the chance to obsess over Larry Prime's shitty little dumpy cartoon body. SO happy, in fact, that I blacked out and when I woke up this chapter was 9k words long. I don't have a problem.
> 
> Art at the bottom is just scattered whatever I've been doodling that might apply to this chapter. All of it is still mine until someone else joins me here in the Larry Hole.

Lance wasn't worried about Dick. It was a point of occasional contention with friends and family, actually, how much he didn't worry about Dick. People on the outside looking in always liked to think they were looking out for his best interests when they stressed the potential fallout of an "open" relationship. Of what they'd call "swinging" with a shifty look, in a conspiratorial whisper. Lance understood why it looked bad from the other side of the glass, why people might worry that Dick - social butterfly and incurable flirt that he was - had pressured him into the idea of leaving the door open.

What they didn't know - and would never know, such was his right - was that _Lance_ had been the one to breach the idea. He still remembered the look on Dick's face; Shock, confusion, but also a strange excitement at Lance's unexpected boldness. A little understated, kind of old-fashioned, certainly not adventurous Lance, who had pulled Dick aside and asked _him_ for permission to chase down the man _he_ had been eyeing from the other side of the club all night. The conversation afterward had been eye-opening for both of them, to say the least.

And so it was here that they set each other's rules: Ask first. Wear protection. Always come home. This was a privilege that Lance didn't find himself using very often - he was picky to the point of absurdity, and Dick checked most of his boxes anyway. The nature of Dick's career and the nature of Dick himself led him to smaller, more frequent flings with little success - which was fine by Lance, and part of why he didn't worry the way people told him he should. Dick was a man with many notches, but very few loves. In some strange way it warmed Lance's heart when Dick came home and immediately complained about how it had gone okay, but he did this that and the other, he tried whatever and it _kinda_ worked, but you always do it better.

All said, Lance had almost told him no this time. Not that he was worried about Dick - as established - but because it was really _fucking_ weird. "You sure?" he had asked carefully. "Small, dork and schlubby isn't usually your type."

Dick had shrugged sort of helplessly at him. "Yeah, but I don't know how to explain this one. Hearing him say all that... _stuff_ in Larry's voice was just," he fanned himself and gave a long, wavery sigh. "It really got to me."

Lance pursed his lips thoughtfully. Dick had been running after their version of Larry ever since they had first matched on Timber. He knew that most of it was Dick's love for a challenge and his attraction to that particular combo of endearing and hapless, though he had a feeling that part of it was attached to some sense of duty. He had backed off for a bit after the Hell's Pawn fiasco, but it was at a party sometime afterwards that Larry had opened the door again. It was a few too many drinks, it was a little too much oversharing, it was maybe a full moon? Either way, in a quiet moment together at the tail end of the party - when they were both still a _little_ tipsy, but not enough for an excuse - Larry told Dick that he had been thinking.

This _definitely_ wasn't that Larry, but Lance figured that it wasn't duty driving this one. Dick just wanted a taste. He wanted to try playing out the fantasy, even if it wouldn't be a one-to-one match. 

Lance had _still_ almost said no. But he also needed an out.

"Protection rule's in full force," he grumbled. "I don't trust Larry's bill of health _now_ , nevermind a few decades on."

Dick smiled at him brightly, and Lance's heart melted so fast he felt it plop straight into his stomach. "I'll double up just for you, darling."

A sharp yelp pulled Lance out of his own head - back into the bright, sterile lights of the gym's back room. He looked down and quickly lifted his own foot off of Larry's. "Sorry."

Larry unlinked their arms and hopped off to inspect the damage, finding no broken toes this time. He stumbled over to his phone sitting next to the speaker. "Yeeeeeesh...I mean, I'll live."

Lance set his jaw, frustrated. He didn't go into this expecting it to be _easy_ , per say, but he never expected himself to be so bad at it. Larry had been working with him on this foxtrot routine for a couple weeks at this point, and he was only now starting to get a hang of keeping the rhythm. Larry, sensing the tenseness crawling down Lance's shoulders, put his foot back down and put on a brave face. He tapped open his phone and slid their song all the way back to the start. "How much time do we have? We'll work on keeping track of steps for a bit."

"We've got as long as we need." Lance approached him again and held out a hand.

"Man, you really got rid of him tonight!" Larry took his hand, and placed his other on Lance's back. "Diana probably won't be around to kick us out for another hour."

Lance nodded. "Yeh, I made sure he's preoccupied." He frowned. "I uh...I really wanted time to get this right."

"Don't sweat it," said Larry, guiding Lance into the first few steps. "We'll take it from the top, okay?"

Larry Laffer was, for all intents and purposes, completely talentless. Even Larry himself couldn't argue that fact. He wasn't particularly skilled in any job he had ever kept. He wasn't very smart, in _any_ sense of the word. He was more resourceful than most, though certainly no MacGuyver and never to an especially valuable end.

But Larry Laffer _was_ very good at dancing - startlingly so, for a man with as few usable skills as him. It was something he had picked up as an extracurricular at school - having nowhere to go after class, when Mama Laffer was out elsewhere doing who knows - and had kept as a hobby through the rest of his life. His training leaned standard ballroom more than anything, but he had become _very_ invested in disco before his impromptu coma. Recently Larry had picked up an interest in modern street after crawling out of the...well, street.

And so Larry found himself in a strange position when he started teaching Lance to foxtrot and found him absolutely, positively _awful_ at anything to do with it. He had no concept of how to keep a beat and move to it at the same time. He didn't glide anywhere so much as lurch awkwardly in any direction, scuffling his feet into the path of his partner's legs constantly. It was maddening how bad he was, but Lance had been so set on being doing something special for their anniversary, so earnest about wanting to learn, and so worried about not living up to the romance of the idea that Larry couldn't find it in his heart to walk away. To Lance's credit he was now...still not great, but certainly better than before. Lance grumbled off beat counts as they fell into the routine, his eyes plastered on his feet. "Hey, I'll count," Larry patted shoulder to get his attention. "Focus on steps, okay? Don't _watch_ your feet, just know where they are."

He led them off towards the left, counting the beat off in fours as they went. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, turn, here. Lance _almost_ got that one right - Larry took a beat to slide his foot into the right spot with his own. One, two, back, step. One, step, two, step. One, two, three, four. Good, good, three, four. One, turn, three, four. Ready, turn, three, and...

"You're good at this next part," Larry told him, letting himself go slack as the bass picked up in the background. "You lead for a bit, okay?"

"I'm not-- Uh, I dunno if--" Lance stammered, suddenly tense.

"Well you're gonna have to when you do this with Dick!" He looked up at Lance with a determined frown. "You lead."

Lance lead, and though his steps were shaky they still guided them both where they needed. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, miss. That's, okay, three, four. He made a particularly tricky turn-step just the way Larry hoped he would and pulled them both into a one, two, three, glide across the floor. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, good. Good, good, good, good. One, two, ready, and. Bring, it, together, and...

He pulled them both together, and something strange fluttered up into Larry's chest. Lance's arms folded around his back and Larry's around his waist, as had always been part of the routine, but something rang different this time. Maybe it was Lance leading. Maybe it was the music. Maybe it was the smell of sweat lingering in the air. Maybe it was a full moon again. Larry took in a sharp breath and stood there for a moment, his head laid against Lance's chest, his heartbeat pounding in his ears.

Lance eventually noticed that this was lasting longer than usual. "...You okay down there?"

Larry nodded, but realized that Lance probably couldn't see it from that angle. "Yeah," he said, though his voice came out smaller than he meant it to. He pulled their bodies a little closer together.  "I, uh...Lance..."

"Uh-huh."

"I wanna try something."

He looked up at him, his face hot and flushed. Lance blinked, but after a moment gave him a small nod.

Larry let out the breath he had been holding this entire time, only to replace it with an even deeper one. Slowly he lifted himself onto his toes and, ever so carefully, pulled Lance into a kiss.

It was slow and timid. It was so light, so gentle that Lance didn't dare pull them together any farther, lest he scare him off. Larry eventually broke away and set his heels back on the ground, staring dazed and confused somewhere into the middle distance. He had never, not once in his life. He never thought he would. He didn't count all the little pecks on the cheek from Dick - it was teasing, Larry never initiated, he hadn't been... _holding_ him like this. He wasn't standing there, surrounded by him. It wasn't bad. It might even be okay. It was _definitely_ scary.

Larry, shaking, swallowed something huge and sharp in his throat as their song petered out. Lance rubbed his back consolingly, and while it didn't stop the shakes it did pull Larry's held breath out in a long, wavering sigh. "You're okay."

"I'm okay," he said quickly, his hands twisted into the fabric of Lance's shirt. He took another deep breath and the smell of sweat clinging to his skin made some strange, primal section of Larry's brain light up like a Christmas tree. He swallowed again, then breathed out. "We...should get back to work."

"Uh-huh."

They finally released each other. Lance watched Larry wobble back over to his phone to restart the song. Lance, despite himself, couldn't stop the smile tugging at the edges of his mouth.

Ugh, _fine_. Maybe Dick was on to something.  
  


* * *

  
"Swanky place you got here," Larry stepped through the threshold like he owned it, his hands shoved into his pockets as he craned his neck around the high-set ceilings. "You didn't tell me you were _that_ kinda model."

"What kind is that?" Dick asked as he shut the door behind him, eyebrow raised.

"The kind that goes places," Larry shot him a toothy grin from the shoe rack, where he was dutifully slipping off his oxfords. He normally wouldn't care enough to bother, but a top floor apartment in New Lost Wages was too nice to scuff up. "Lotsa people call themselves models nowadays."

"Hmm! Well, I like to think I'm good at what I do," Dick hummed on his way to the kitchen. "I can't take _all_ the credit, Lance is a working man too."

"Oh sure. Speaking of..."

"Out and about! He said not to expect him home until late," Dick said over the gentle tinkling of glass as he pawed through the cabinet. "Can I get you a drink? We have this bottle of merlot we've been working through..."

"Please!" Larry chimed back from the coat closet. "Convenient of him to duck out like that, huh?"

"I think I'm the one being convenient here," he poured a healthy glug of merlot into two wine glasses. "I didn't have to do nearly as much convincing as I should've."

"Oho..." Larry stepped into the doorway, and Dick shook a glass expectantly at him. As he passed off the drink, it struck Dick how much better he looked without that gaudy suit jacket on. He didn't dare say anything - knowing either Larry, he'd probably just use it as an excuse to double down on more polyester. "You think he's out making his own fun?"

Dick laughed a little too loud, covering his mouth too late to actually stop anything. "Oh my god, Lance would _die_ before he chased tail without telling me. He can't even have a wet dream about his favorite celeb without giving me a play-by-play afterwards." He stopped for a swig of merlot. "Hmm, is that TMI? What I mean is, I think he's doing something I can't know about."

Larry wobbled his hand. "Well you didn't tell me _who_ he's having wet dreams about, so I think you're _juuuust_ under the oversharing mark."

Dick laughed through his nose and took another drink. "Our anniversary's this week."

Larry quirked his eyebrow partway through a swig.

"And he hasn't said _anything_ about it."

"Oooh," Larry shot a finger at him.

Dick shot a finger right back. "So either I'm smarter than he thinks I am, or I'm _dumber_ than _I_ think I am."

"I guess you'll find out, huh?" Larry wobbled his empty glass at Dick, who promptly topped him off. "You kids are so in tune I could puke."

"Right? Healthy relationships are such a millennial thing," Dick poured himself another round of merlot. "All we do is corrupt the sacred institution of marriage, then we take a break to kill luxury industries and eat avocados."

Larry rolled his eyes. "Okay boomer."

Dick smacked his hand on the nice marble counter top, forcing himself to swallow his mouthful of merlot before he spat it all over the floor.

Larry grinned and tipped his glass to him. "Thanks for having me over!"

"Hoo...oh my god." It took a second for Dick to compose himself again. "Well, I couldn't really argue with the strike system."

"That's why I used it, baby!" He held his drink out and Dick, rolling his eyes playfully, brought their glasses together with a little _clink_. "I knew my clone would run into another technological disaster or five while I'm here. Might as well get something out of it."

"Mhmm~! Well, Mr. Three Strikes..." Dick leaned back on the counter and crossed one leg over the other. "It's your turn to do some oversharing."

Larry's smile dropped a bit, confused.

"You should tell me how you got here."

Larry's smile dropped completely, _very_ confused.

"Here," Dick made an encompassing motion with his hand. "As in, chasing me down so I'll shove my cock down your throat. Or vice-versa."

"Oh," he blinked, a little bewildered. "What's it matter?"

"I want cheat codes for _my_ Larry," he said before taking another drink. "Don't get me wrong, I'm _still_ going to fuck the shit out of you. But I could use some help loosening up your other half. He's uh..." Dick frowned, a little put out. "He's kind of a prickly little dude."

Larry laughed once, a sharp bark more than anything. "Hoo _boy_ ! Get ready for the long haul, kiddo. You wanna know how long it took me to look at someone else's schlong without wanting to puke?" He sneered up at him, his lip curled up to show a brief flash of gums. "I was almost _sixty_ when I sucked cock for the first time."

Dick was looking a little white. He knew that Larry would be a tough nut to crack, but hearing the truth of it was...disheartening, to say the least. He felt sorry for everyone involved, frankly. Larry looked at him pointedly and Dick nodded as a sign to continue - that despite being disappointed he was still curious. "Okay, okay. Lemme sit down for this one," he said as he set his glass down and braced both hands behind him before one, two, three, heaving himself up to sit on the counter. They were almost eye level now - as much as Dick liked a man close to his crotch, he preferred being able to see Larry's face without bending over.

"So, Fifteen years ago," he paused for another glug of merlot, crossing one leg casually across the other, "I'm in the middle of this party at my nephew's college. Being a good uncle, y'know? Supporting my darling nephew who I love _very_ much..." 

He flashed a cheeky little grin at Dick, who rolled his eyes through another sip. There was no reason to talk about the ulterior motives - they both knew better already.

"So I meet this chick, and she's..." He exhaled through his nose. "Tall, dark, artsy, like if you stuck a beret on a porn star and gave 'em a Fic Lit degree. Tells me her name's...yeesh, what was it? Cocoa or something." Larry scratched his head idly. "So we get to dancin', and then we get to talkin', and then we get to her dorm. And then she's like, 'eat me out'. And I'm like," he nodded once, emphatically. "Yes _please._ "

Dick giggled a little under his breath. Larry shrugged. "Yeah, well, what else did you expect?"

"Not much." Dick waved his hand at him to go on.

"So she gets on the bed, right? And she starts pullin' everything off, and I'm pullin' everything off, and then I look up and she's...well, she's..."

Dick leaned in a little, glass set to his lips.

"...She's hung like a _horse_."

Dick nearly launched another mouthful of merlot against the wall. He didn't know what he was expecting, but it _definitely_ wasn't that.

Larry set one hand behind him so he could lean back, closing his eyes with a wistful sigh. "So I'm sitting here head-to-head with this chick's schlong, and I have this flashback to La Costa Lotta almost ten years before. When I chase this girl down to the beach, and she whips it out, and I..." He opened his eyes and set his jaw. "I blow chunks all over the sand. It wasn't my best moment."

Dick nodded through another sip. Sure, the nineties were weird.

Larry shrugged. "But after everything's said and done I keep catchin' myself thinking about it. Like, I keep wondering about what would happen, what would it feel like. Having, like..." He put a hand to his stomach slowly, tentatively. "Having a girl inside _me_ instead. First it was weird-- just a weird thought that came up sometimes and then I thought about something else. And then it was kind of interesting. And then it was..." He took in a wavering breath. "Exciting. It was new and fresh. It wasn't the same PIV shit I spent my whole life chasing after, thinking that's where sex peaks. I stopped thinkin' about it and started gettin' off to it."

He paused for a second to take a drink and let his breathing settle. His free hand reached up to fuss idly with his shirt collar, revealing a thin flash of gold chain laid across his chest. "So when my brain plops me back down in front of this new chick, and I'm starin' down her shaft, and she's thick as a damn tree trunk...I tell myself, Larry. Larry _fucking_ Laffer." He shook his head. "If you run away from this one, you'll never forgive yourself. So you better nut up and start licking nuts." 

They looked at each other. "So I did."

Dick scooted a little closer to Larry's spot on the counter, earnestly interested, maybe a little aroused. "And?"

Larry smiled serenely at him. "She used me like a cock sleeve." 

He closed his eyes again as the memories floated back, sending a deep flush crawling up his neck. His breathing began to wobble again as he recalled the way her fingers tangled into his hair as she slid him down, down, down onto her hot, throbbing cock. The way she had used him like a tool, an object, a cheap fleshlight to be squeezed and stuffed and tossed afterwards. The way she had cum inside him at the very end; just loads and _loads_ of it, more than his little body could ever hope to handle, and had left him so full he could barely move - dirty, leaking, like some wretched little used up toy. 

His eyes fluttered back open. "It was incredible. _She_ was...incredible." He took another steadying breath. "You take a girl's cock _once_ and suddenly you're like...wow, y'know? Like, what else have I been missing?" 

Dick ran his tongue across his lips, restless. It wasn't the story itself getting to him (girl cock was still _girl_ cock after all, and he was entirely too gay for that life) so much as watching him experience it again; the way he squirmed a little as he spoke, the way he was failing to hide how breathy his words were getting. "So...what'd you find?"

"I found out that a lot of what I thought were undeniable truths of Larrydom was just shit I told myself on repeat." Another sip, another shrug. "Found out a lot of things I thought would be the end of Larry as I knew him left me still Larry at the end. Found out I like a _lot_ of stuff I thought I was scared of. Found out boys are just fine." Larry smiled at him, something sharp and a little wicked. "Found out I'll chase a boy all the way to his apartment so he'll fuck me already."

One of Larry's fingers tugged at his belt loop, and Dick suddenly realized where he was standing. He wasn't sure how he had migrated over here, but now he found himself in the perfect position to set his free hand behind Larry, bringing them both chest-to-chest. Gently, Larry teased Dick's wine glass out of his hand and set it far off to the side where he had abandoned his own. "You wanna talk about _me_ going places?" Dick laughed as he slipped a hand under the collar of Larry's shirt. His fingers traced the outline of his collarbones, small but pronounced. "You work pretty fast."

"Mhm," he hummed, gradually unbuttoning his shirt to give Dick more space to roam. "I'm just taking what I want."

The cheek of him pulled a short laugh, sort of a snort, out of Dick. His hand dipped lower to squeeze at the little layer of softness covering his thin chest. He looped a finger through the gold chain and tugged back so that it strained against his neck, and Larry tilted his head back so that Dick could kiss along his throat. "If you break that thing, you're buying me a new one," Larry grumbled, followed by a sharp gasp as Dick left what was definitely going to be a hickey the next day.

"Interesting priorities you have," Dick rumbled back, giving the chain one more sharp tug before leaving it alone. He ran his teeth lightly over the skin of his throat as he finally pulled away from him, and removed the last of Larry's shirt to reveal...well...

...He really was _disastrously_ unattractive, wasn't he? Dick supposed he should probably be less surprised - the quick math in his head told him that _this_ Larry was probably hovering around seventy, and even his own much younger Larry wasn't aging gracefully. Dick ran his fingers across the pronounced bits of rib cage peeking out from under his chest, then over the curve of his stomach as it bowed out below that. Dick brought his hand under to squeeze gently at the sensitive skin beneath his belly, and Larry leaned back with a pleased rumble somewhere in the back of his throat. Not incredibly soft, but certainly not a potbelly. Just a mound of pudge where several decades of not giving a shit had collected.

Dick brought a hand back up to trace his fingers along the ridges and divots formed by his ribs. He was going to stand by his initial assessment of 'unattractive', but Dick also found his body...interesting, he guessed was the best word for it. As Larry's arms wrapped around the back of his neck, it occurred to him how thick and strangely proportioned his limbs were. As Larry's hands worked into his hair, he remembered the missing fingers from their first handshake. It was still a little weird, but in this moment it was also strange and exotic. He liked the look of his torso, he figured, and the way it was lithe and bony in some spots while it was soft and round in others. Dick slid his hands across Larry's back and brought his face down to nuzzle into the concave space between his ribs and his stomach - his favourite spot, he decided in that very moment.

"You're weird."

Dick responded with a pleased, rumbly little rolling noise with the back of his tongue. He pressed a kiss into the warm crevice he had claimed for himself, before pulling back so their eyes met again. "You're distracting."

Larry, his fingers still entwined in the thick ink of Dick's hair, pulled him closer so he could lock his legs around his waist. "You don't know the half of it," he fairly purred before tugging Dick into a kiss.

Oh, he was _aggressive_. Surprisingly so. Larry pushed forward and Dick - not to be outdone - pushed harder, until both of them were angled sharply over the kitchen counter. Larry's tongue ran roughly over his teeth and Dick gave a shuddering little moan in response, pressing his fingers into the dip between his shoulder blades. It was so strange exploring a body so much smaller than his. Dick splayed his hand against his back and found that he covered most of its width.

"I'm not gonna fuck you in the kitchen," he broke away just long enough to say. "It's unsanitary."

"Party pooper."

"Your back will thank me tomorrow." He pulled Larry upright. He expected him to be a little more dense, but Dick was able to take him by the hips and scoot him up to the edge of the counter with ease. "I'll give you a ride."

"Well I'd sure hope so!", Larry shot back with indigence. "What else did I come here for?"

"Nuh-uh, other ride."

Before Larry could question it, Dick slid both hands under his butt and heaved him up into his arms. "Showoff," He huffed, fingers tracing the outline of his jaw as he spoke, running lightly over rough stubble and olive skin. "Theatrics don't work when I'm already half naked in your kitchen, stud."

Dick giggled into another kiss. Carefully he backed out of the kitchen and shuttled them both through the door, across the understated but still welcoming living area, past the sensible couch and towards the-- "Hey. Couch."

He didn't stop, so Larry squeezed his legs around Dick's waist like he was whoaing a horse. "Couch," he said, and pointed back towards the living room.

Dick gave him a weird look. "Bed?"

"Couch. I need leverage."

Dick looked back at the couch. He supposed the guy had a point - with their size difference, it would help to have an arm or a backrest to brace himself on. But… "Kind of a tight fit."

"For _you_ , maybe." He punctuated himself with a sharp tug at Dick's hair. "Couch."

Fine. Couch. Dick plopped his bedmate unceremoniously onto the seat, where Larry immediately went about undoing his belt. "Someone's impatient," Dick chided, taking his sweet time tossing off some of the backrest's cushions so they had more room to play. Larry fit comfortably on the couch even with them, but Dick was already taller than average and was bound to have a tight time without a little leeway.

"Can you blame me?" Larry had already blasted through his pants and was stripping off his socks and undies. "You're beautiful."

Dick couldn't help a flustered little laugh. He finally set about stripping off his pants and Larry laid back against the armrest to watch, one arm crossed behind his head and the other ever-so-gently stroking himself. He didn't want to pregame _too_ hard. "God you have nice legs," he moaned through a pump that was just a little too excited. 

And so he did; long and shapely with strong, thick calves covered in a dark layer of carefully landscaped hair. Dick turned on his heel to show off as he wriggled out of his underwear. "Hmm~! Glad you think so. That's not exactly what most people are looking at, though…"

He had a cock made for the camera. Larry saw now why he could pay New Lost Wages rent on a modeling career. Dick slid one hand slowly, agonizingly down his shaft, teasing the foreskin back to reveal a thick, pristine head. Even at half chub it was obvious he was well-equipped; not monstrous, but certainly above average. "Big boy…" Larry purred from his spot on the couch, and Dick smiled at him knowingly.

He mounted the couch and Larry slipped his hands under his shirt before Dick could even _start_ to take it off. He had a runner's build, Larry discovered as he stripped off his last piece of clothing. Sleek, even, lightly muscled, easy to carry. He had to get onto his knees so he could reach high enough to finally slip the shirt over Dick's head, at which point he tossed it into some far corner of the room to be forgotten. Larry splayed his hand out against his chest ( _Three fingers,_ Dick's thoughts echoed, _Weird weird weird)_ and scooted himself up so that their hips were aligned. "You sure you're ready for me, handsome?" He said, in a voice that would have been low and husky if his vocal chords were capable of it. "I'm kind of a rough ride." 

Larry wrapped his hand around both their cocks and pressed them together, shaft-to-shaft.

Dick - somehow, someway - stifled a horrendous guffaw in time to turn it into an ugly snort instead. There was no earthly way to make Larry's schlong look any smaller than stacking it against his own, literally in this case. Taint to tip, he made it just halfway up Dick's shaft. Three-fourths, if you wanted to be generous and probably a liar. 

Larry looked up at him pointedly. Dick looked away. Wordlessly, Larry slowly began to pump on both of their cocks, spidering his fingers so his thumb pressed roughly against his own shaft while the rest of them curled around Dick's - near the tip, the base, and another one somewhere in the middle. He had these cartoonishly big, thick digits that felt almost alien stroking Dick's member, but it had to be said that they were _very_ effective. "Not bad for a warm up, huh?" He huffed, finding a particular stroke-squeeze rhythm that pulled a breathy little groan out of Dick. 

He sped up. Dick shuddered deeply and leaned back to give him more real estate. A thin trail of precum dribbled out onto Larry's member below, and he took the opportunity to raise his hips so his cock slid roughly up the underside of Dick's shaft, up until they were almost head-to-head. The thumb was back in play, and each inch of pressure on his own tip pressed up against the sensitive bundle of skin just under Dick's head. 

"Listen, much as I like waving this thing around…" He punctuated himself with a few final, rapid strokes, just to be _extra_ sure he had Dick's attention. The overt gasp and the hip jerking said yes. "You should probably get around to fucking me."

"Yuh-- yeah," Dick forced out in a short breath, taken more than a little off guard. He didn't expect the weirdo cartoon handjob to work that well. "I'll grab some lube," he said, hoisting himself off the couch. "A fan sent me some really nice stuff last week."

"Nifty," Larry hummed, running a finger idly across his head. "I can't stand that cheapo stuff that dries up soon as it touches air."

"Gotta scrounge up a condom, too."

Larry pouted incredulously, and Dick waved his wedding ring at him in response before dipping into the bedroom.

He leaned back on his hands and stared at his own cock pensively. He wasn't surprised, but still found himself mildly disappointed. After a decade or so of discovering the joy of other people's members, he had found that one of his favourite parts was actually the very end. The wonderful feeling of fullness, like someone was plugging up a deep void in him every time they painted his walls. Larry thought about his first penile encounter, where Cocoa or Cacao or Koko or whoever had cum absolute _buckets_ inside of him at the very end. He thought about the way he had clenched every muscle in his body just to keep all of it inside of him, to live with the sensation of being filled to the brim by her as long as he could. He remembered how she had laid herself over him afterwards and whispered in his ear about how he hadn't cum at all, what a poor baby, I can fix that - before grabbing him by the cock and teasing him on and off for what was probably minutes, but felt like hours. 

He finally got off. All of her cum spilled out of him. All of his cum painted splatters up the near wall. He was a mess.

Dick trotted back into the room, brandishing a bottle of lube with a fancy label and a much less fancy condom. "Here's the stuff. We're really into it so far." He shook the bottle a little and it produced an unappetizing sloshing sound.

Larry nodded. "Sounds like good pussy."

"I'll take your word for it." Dick plopped down on the couch again and set the lube aside while he fiddled with the condom wrapper.

Larry crossed his arms over his chest and threw another pout at Dick. "Gotta suit up for Typhoid Mary over here."

"I'm being safe. Didn't they have sex ed in the stone age?"

"It's not like I have the clap or anything!"

"Citation needed."

Dick finally finished rolling his condom on and Larry laid back, throwing his arms across the armrest. "Whatever," he huffed, bapping Dick's member lightly with his foot and setting it a-wobble. "Long as you know how to use that thing."

"I'd be worried if I didn't!" Dick squeezed a sizable glob of lube onto his fingers and tossed the bottle - probably wherever his shirt went - before leaning in over Larry. He smiled down at him; a smolder in his eyes and a thin glint of teeth that was too perfect for him not to have practiced. Larry figured that must be a popular look for the photos, and he frankly couldn't blame anyone for it. Dick splayed his hand out over Larry's ass - three fingers braced on his cheeks, one in waiting, and one just barely touching the entrance to his hole. "Hold your breath, babe."

The first finger went in, and Dick...started to worry, actually. He was tight. He was _really_ tight. He moved his finger in a small, slow circle and Larry dug his nails into the armrest like it was something twice as large. Dick had expected a little resistance if he was going to fuck a man this size, but this might be more than he bargained for. "You, uh...let me know if I need to slow down, okay?" He said, pushing in deeper and dragging a lusty moan out of the older man. 

"Ah...I'm fine…" he hissed through his teeth. "I just need to warm up…"

"I can tell." Dick's finger made a wider loop and Larry squirmed against him. "You're... _really_ tight, man."

"So I'm told," he sort of laughed, sort of groaned.

It took a few progressively wider loops, but he _was_ loosening up a little. Each time Dick pushed and stretched the reaction was less strained, and eventually Larry tapped him on the arm to put the other one in. That, too, was met with more resistance than Dick was ready for. He gently scissored both fingers and Larry made this indistinct whining-growling noise as his hips bucked once, suddenly. Stretch, push. Stretch, push. It was...working, ish. Gradually less wincing and squirming, less difficult to spread his fingers.

Eventually Larry slid his hands over Dick's shoulders and met his eyes. "I didn't come over so you could finger me for an hour," he said evenly.

Dick swallowed. He wasn't sure if he would fit, even after everything. He withdrew his fingers and repositioned himself so that his tip pressed against his hole. 

He hesitated.

Larry growled at him. " _Fuck_ me already."

Dick closed his eyes and took a deep breath,

but it was knocked out of him anyway as soon as he thrust in. Oh god it was tight. Oh _god_ it was so, _so_ tight. Dick opened his eyes to discover he'd barely made a dent - his head was in, and that was it. He gave a shuddering breath and pulled out, then pushed back in. His head, and maybe an extra centimeter. This didn't bode well.

"Having trouble?" Larry asked, almost breathless. Dick looked at him confused, and Larry smiled in turn. "Don't tell me I'm too much for you."

Dick ground his teeth together, pulled out, and pushed in again. Larry gasped, so did Dick. Farther in, but only barely. He shut his eyes and stayed there for a moment, his head swimming from the warmth surrounding him. Not _even_ surrounding him - this was just his head and barely an inch of shaft! He took a sharp breath in through his teeth and pushed again, rising up bare centimeters from where he was. Larry squirmed under him and uttered a long, low moan as bit by agonizing bit slid in. Cute, but unhelpful.

"You're so tight," Dick forced out in a voice far too small. He pulled and pushed and pulled and pushed again, desperate to get more of him inside. He was nearing the halfway mark. "Larry...oh god it's so _tight_."

"Mmhmmm…" Larry arched his back and Dick slid in a bare centimeter more. "Is that a problem?"

"It…" Dick squeezed his eyes shut. This was a first. "It might be."

Larry clucked his tongue. "But _Dick_ ," he cooed, arching up just enough so that their noses touched. It wasn't very far - his was comically large in comparison. "I thought you were gonna fuck the shit out of me."

His face burned. He did say that, didn't he? He figured this had something to do with the cart before the horse, he couldn't remember right now because half of his cock was stuck in a vice grip.

"Let me give you a hand," he said, shooting Dick a sly little grin as he braced against the arm rest and slowly lifted himself up. "I want you to remember this," he purred, "When you're out chasing my lesser half."

Dick's cock began to slip out again, and he couldn't stop a frantic little whine from escaping his throat as he watched those hard-earned inches play out in reverse. "When you're wasting all your time and energy trying to make him see what it took me this long to learn." Larry stopped so that just the tip was still inside of him. "When you finally get to fuck him. When he's clumsy. When it's _bad_."

Larry set one foot on Dick's chest to steady himself, holding his body off the cushions, hovering on the bare precipice of his member.

"When you finally get there…"

Larry _slammed_ himself onto his cock, his entire weight sending him straight down to the hilt in one swift motion. 

Dick let loose a noise he had never in his life heard - some fantastic mix of shock, fear and pleasure that had ripped itself from somewhere deep, _deep_ in his chest. Larry gasped for breath, shuddering, moaning as his cock pulsed and twitched against his inner walls. He arched his back and bucked his hips, desperate to fit more of him inside when there was none to have.

It took them both some time to catch their breath, but Larry found his first. He rolled his head back against the armrest and grinned, a flash of gums and teeth catching the dim kitchen light.

"...I hope you think of me."

Dick's arms shook. His hips trembled. It felt so _good_ inside of him. Now that his entire cock was in it felt like he was being beautifully, aggressively smothered and caressed between the walls of a soft, warm cave. He had never been in anything this tight before - no man for sure, and not even any toys had ever gripped him as hard as this. He looked down at Larry and, through a thick haze of pleasure, wondered where all his cock could have possibly gone in such a little body. He mumbled something tired and confused as he pulled out a few inches and pushed back in, so much easier than before. That didn't help him at all - whatever bullshit cartoon physics at play here were beyond the one functioning brain cell he had in this position.

He thrust a few more times and made it all the way down the shaft for most of them. They had crossed some kind of threshold after Larry's big push and it was so smooth, so easy now. One particularly excited thrust hit Larry's prostate in just the right way to drag out a long delicious _mooaannnn_ from the older man, sending fireworks shooting through Dick’s head. He felt a wobbly smile cross his face, not caring about the slack in his jaw or the trail of drool he could definitely feel dribbling down his chin. More. He wanted more. More tight. More warm. More sounds. He thrust over and over into the same spot and felt Larry's hips buck and squirm and tremble each time they met his, setting fire to some dumb animal part of Dick's brain that he hadn't known of until just now. More. _More._

He was halfway through the next thrust when Larry clenched.

Dick stopped midway and doubled over, shaking and sputtering, sweat and slobber and tears dripping across Larry's body. He didn't think it could be any more overwhelming and he was wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

"Ah...slow down there, stud…" Larry gasped out, trying to catch his breath. "Don't wanna...end it so early…"

The walls of the cave relaxed and then contracted again, hot and pulsing, strangling him, crushing him, and Dick eked out a whimper through gritted teeth. "Neat, right?" Larry asked through a little chuckle. "Learned that all by myself. Keeps thirsty boys like you from blowing your load too fast."

Another clench, but softer this time. A loving embrace. Dick closed his eyes and responded with a pleasant hum, the tenseness rolling off his shoulders.

"You like that, huh?" Larry clenched again, softly, and Dick nodded in some nebulous direction. The concept of space was starting to break down. Larry's voice was coming from...somewhere, he guessed under him. "Uh-huhh, it feels pretty good from here too…" Larry repositioned so that the rest of Dick slid inside of him, right back down to the hilt. He curled his arms around the back of Dick's neck and arched his back into a tight curve, a satisfying little _Mmmm~_ noise escaping his lips as he revelled in the incredible sense of fullness. 

Dick felt himself being pulled down. He felt Larry's fingers tangle into his hair again. Eyes still closed he searched for Larry's mouth and found his cheek, his neck, his nose before they managed to lock lips. He was sloppy about it now - tired, horny, animal, he bared his teeth into the kiss as he pulled out and pushed in again, slowly this time. Each time their hips met Larry would gently squeeze and Dick would stay there for a moment to enjoy the slow, rhythmic pulsing.

"Am I everything you dreamed of?" Larry broke away to whisper in his ear.

"Mhmph…"

"Hmm?" 

"Mmuh-huh," Dick mumbled through another exhausted nod.

"Good," he purred, nibbling gently on his earlobe. "I think you should thank me for the experience."

Dick only sort of heard him through the fog. Something about being thankful? He mumbled a string of vague words, hoping it was somewhere near the right response so he could keep riding along without interruption.

It wasn’t. The rapid little one-two thrust that hit his prostate ripped a rough gasp out of Larry, but wasn’t enough to distract him from the principle. He cleared his throat next to Dick’s ear, his fingers winding a little tighter into his hair. 

What? Dick barely registered that one. He paused for a second, then continued his grind.

Larry set his jaw. “I said…”

Dick thrust all the way in again and at that moment Larry clenched, _hard_ . Whatever noise he was about to make was cut short as Larry dug his fist into his hair and tugged back, snapping Dick’s head up so their eyes could meet. “You should _thank_ me.”

“Th-th-thanks,” he said, squeezing his eyes shut, his voice wavering just over a pathetic mewl. Larry relaxed and then clenched again, once, twice, thrice with renewed fervor until Dick’s eyes snapped open again. “Ah! A-Ahh thank you!” He blurted out, his hips jerking frantically against Larry’s. He couldn’t tell if he was trying to push in or pull out anymore. “Th-thank you! Thankyouthankyouthankyou!”

“You’re welcome! That wasn’t so hard, huh?” Dick stared at him, eyes wild. Larry smiled at him benevolently, as if he had done him a favour. He untangled his fingers from his hair and Dick’s head drooped heavily. “You love it.”

He did. He was exhausted, but he loved it. He felt like every nerve ending in his body was surging with electricity. His head was filled with nothing but blood and mist and a deep, primal desire to fuck and fuck and fuck until one of them shattered into a million pieces. He was an animal, a fire being stoked until it was an inferno. He couldn’t control anything, not even himself. He _loved_ it.

Dick nodded his head in whatever direction it was already hanging, and Larry gave a pensive little hum. “You love _me_.”

He heard that one loud and clear, but Dick didn’t look at him.

Larry tensed threateningly. “You _love_ me.”

Well...he could control one thing. 

“No...”

The room was silent, apart from both their ragged breathing. 

After aeons, Larry brought his hand up and used his thumb to brush a thick trail of tears and sweat off his cheek. 

“Good man,” he heard Larry’s voice say from somewhere beyond the fog. His hands cupped his face and gently brought their lips together again. “He’s lucky to have you.”

In Larry’s brief moment of vulnerability Dick pounced; hungry, _starving_ , his tongue forced its way into his mouth and swiped possessively against the back reaches of his teeth. He thrust in with renewed force and Larry’s startled _yipe!_ was barely audible around his tongue. When he hit that sweet, deep zone from before Larry gasped and whined and Dick _groowwlled_ into his open mouth. He gripped Larry’s hips and held him in place so that he could pound mercilessly against that perfect spot, over and over and over, again and again and again until his huffing and panting gave way to heaves and cries. _Not so tough now_ , is what Dick wanted to say, but couldn’t find words for. He didn’t have words anymore, didn’t know what they were.  

Larry writhed against him and Dick gave another rough growl as his fingers dug into his skin. Oh, he wanted more of that. He wanted him to struggle more. 

Dick broke their kiss and readjusted so he could grab Larry’s wrists instead, locking his arms over his head. Their hips pressed into each other even harder at this angle and each thrust drove Dick down deeper, rougher, sending spasms up through Larry’s spine. Each time Larry rocked and struggled against him Dick thrust in harder, faster, like he was being punished for it. Dick couldn’t see his face from his angle but he _could_ hear him gasp and cry with each pump, and imagining his face - beet red and streaked with tears, sweat and snot - was enough to drive his feral horny idiot brain absolutely _bonkers_. In the last sprint he picked up a rhythm, deep and harsh and steady. One, two. One, two. Thump, thump. Thump, thump. THUMP, THUMP. THUMP, THUMP. THUMP--

Larry came first and he came _hard_ , splattering against both their stomachs. Dick didn’t really notice. It didn’t take him long to follow, and after a few more rounds of that steady _thump, thump_ rhythm he came too. _But not_ **_inside_ ** _me_ , Larry added bitterly.

Dick collapsed on top of him, cutting Larry’s afterglow short. If he heard the muffled swearing coming from under him, he didn’t care. It felt like he had emptied his entire soul into that condom. Larry eventually escaped from underneath him and toppled onto the floor in a crumpled mess. “Hey,” he said as he rose shakily to his feet, “Roll over, will ya?

Dick mumbled face-down into the cushions until Larry did enough shoving to annoy him into rolling over. Larry clambered up and laid himself over Dick’s body with a long yawn. They were dripping in sweat and Larry was laying directly on top of the puddle of cum he had launched onto Dick’s stomach, but he wasn’t worried about it. That’s what showers were for. Maybe Dick could help.

“You’re pretty good at that, tiger.” Larry brought his fist up and knocked Dick’s jaw lightly. 

Dick pushed out a tired chuckle. “Am I everything you dreamed of?”

“All that, plus a cheeky little brat.” With a huff, Larry slid up to tuck himself under Dick’s chin.

He snorted through his nose. “You’ve gotta teach me how to do that thing with your thing.”

“My what with my what?”

“Y’know, the…” Dick clenched his fist a few times.

“Ohh. That’s just practice.” Larry curled in on himself. “You train it like any other muscle.”

He nodded into the ceiling. “Huh.”

“You’ll get there,” Larry gave another yawn, smaller this time, and closed his eyes. “Eventually...”

Dick curled an arm up to stroke Larry’s hair, still full and soft where there was any left to have. An errant finger brushed over his bald spot and pulled him out of the moment briefly - you know, for a second he had forgotten he was fucking a man more than twice his age. He considered saying something snarky about it, but a high nasal snore from under his chin told him not to. He’d give him a hard time later, Dick decided, as the sounds of the city outside faded ever farther away.  
  


* * *

  
Lance shut the door behind him with a gentle _click_. Ever so carefully he tiptoed across the floor, past the bed, towards their shared bath--

“Hey babe…”

Nuts. Dick smiled sleepily at him from under the covers, one arm outstretched. “Where ya goin’?”

“Takin’ a shower,” he answered, setting down his gym bag. “Sorry hun, I was tryin’ not to wake you up.”

“Nuh-uh.” Both arms were out now, and Dick waggled his fingers expectantly. “C’mere.”

“Hun, I’m soaked.” Lance rolled his shirt up over his head. “I’ll ruin the sheets.”

“They're easier to clean than what _I_ ruined today,” Dick sang back. “C’mooooooonnnn~”

Ugh, he was too soft for this. Lance shuffled off his shorts and slid into bed next to his husband, who greeted him with a warm embrace and a smooch. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Oh nothing,” Dick giggled into the space between his pecs. His chest was warm and damp with sweat, and the smell of him set Dick’s nerves a-tingle. “Just don’t sit on the couch for a bit.”

"Gross." Lance ruffled his hair. “Yer a menace.”

“A little.” Dick grinned at him, and Lance almost melted into the mattress. 

“So…” Lance flushed lightly. He wasn’t sure he’d ever stop getting flustered by this part. “How’d it go?”

Dick nodded at him, chipper. “Went fine! No one died.”

“Was he, uh…” Lance hesitated. He didn’t know how to connect the next words with anything to do with Larry Laffer, of all people. “...was he good?”

Dick nodded again, a little smaller. “Yeah.”

“Huh.”

“He was like…” Dick bit his lip. “ _Really_ good.”

Lance felt his blood go cold. “Oh.”

“Buuuuut…” Dick traced his finger in a loop around Lance’s chest. “I did learn a couple things.”

Lance let out the breath he had been holding. The warmth rushed back in. “Issat right?”

“Uh huuuuuh~ I’ve got some _stuff_ to tell you about.” Dick wriggled a little closer and grinned at him, mischievous. “Cause I know you’d do it better.”

 


	9. Shame

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is it. This is where we separate the wheat from the chaff. This is where the boys become men, and the girls also become men. We've got musk. We've got feet. We've got Larry Prime's ENTIRE taint. Look upon it, and despair.
> 
> This chapter is gross! If you're not into huffing pits then congratulations; this is the only musky part I plan to write for this fic. Feet will make a few triumphant returns, but this is where the grody factor peaks. 
> 
> If you *are* into huffing pits then you're welcome! You're also sexy and valid. Trust me, I would know.

He had the apartment all to himself today! His shorter self had popped out of bed and absconded pretty quickly, citing people to do and things to see as the reason he was less of a zombie this morning than others. Larry had been a little nonplussed over it - how was he already so busy? He didn’t even live here!

Whatever. He wasn’t going to worry too much about what trouble that old coot was causing outside. After a night of battling against Lance’s lack of rhythm, he was ready to stay in for a bit.

Tame Impala had released a new track a few days before, and it had been playing on repeat through the apartment for the last hour or so. It was a weekday, and Larry was between jobs - after jumping 30 years into the future, he was having trouble jumping back into his old career. He was currently hopping around between contract jobs while he found a niche in the new world of programming that he could squeeze back into. It turns out that a lot about tech changes in just a few decades. 

“Something doesn’t feel right…” he mumbled along with the song as it looped back around to the beginning for the buhzillionth time. “That’s enough for one night, hope you get home alright…”

He swung his feet idly as he considered the ad in front of him; scrounged up from the back pages on Indebt-dot-com, as they said it on the commercials. “There I go, blaaaame it on the weatherrrr…” he followed along, around the finger that he was pensively chewing on. He eventually shuffled it over to the Maybe column and moved on. His previous contract had only ended a couple weeks ago, and he wasn’t too worried about it yet. It helped that Lefty charged peanuts for this place - if he didn’t, his tenants might actually have a case.

Larry’s phone _ding_ ’d at him from the bedside table, and he shuffled onto his elbows to check the screen.

...He couldn’t see it from this angle. Larry grunted and got onto his knees so he could lean over and check it properly.

 **_Diana ᕙ( •̀ ᗜ •́ )ᕗ  
_** _12:50 PM  
_ _< [   u coming to the gym?   ]_

He definitely wasn’t, thank you _very_ much, but he’d rather tell her that now and avoid a verbal thrashing later. He grabbed the phone and plopped back onto his stomach in front of the laptop.

 **_Me  
_** _12:51 PM  
_ _< [   nah I’m tired from last night. lance still sucks   ]_

Maybe that was mean. He sucked less than he used to.

 **_Diana ᕙ( •̀ ᗜ •́ )ᕗ  
_** _12:53 PM  
_ _< [   lol   ]_

 **_Diana ᕙ( •̀ ᗜ •́ )ᕗ  
_** _12:53 PM  
_ _< [   plz? Im giving ur dad a session later. thought ud wanna come with  ]_

Larry felt all the blood in his body freeze over. He read the text five more times before he felt like he could respond.

 **_Me  
_** _12:57 PM  
_ _< [   what?   ]_

He buried his face in his hands while he waited for her answer. His cheeks felt clammy.

 **_Diana ᕙ( •̀ ᗜ •́ )ᕗ  
_** _1:00 PM  
_ _< [   met ur dad at leftys he said he wanted a workout  ]_

Larry grit his teeth so hard he thought they might all explode.

 **_Me  
_** _1:01 PM  
_ _< [   I don’t know my dad :\  ]_

His phone vibrated to life shortly after. An incoming call from Diana.

His hands shook as he stared at the alert screen. Fire rushed into his veins. He was gonna kill him. He was gonna throttle that little cuck until he didn’t know up from down anymore. He was gonna make him wish neither of them had ever been born.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out. At the last possible moment, Larry swiped open his phone and took the call.

 

* * *

 

Larry tugged down on the lat bar with markedly more trouble than before. He hadn't expected anything easy from a session with a girl like Diana...but he had hoped she might've gone a _little_ easy on him, taking his age and (lack of) fitness into account.

Right now, just as they passed the two hour mark, he realized that he may have been wrong. He let his arms go slack and the bar raised up again.

"Keep your back straight," said Diana, putting a hand on his chest and pushing him down against the cushioned table. His tank was damp to the touch, a lightning bolt trail of sweat staining the front. "Don't follow the bar."

Larry grunted in response and shakily made it through another rep. A fresh line of sweat beaded on his forehead.

"Yep, just like that." She took her hand away and let Larry get through one on his own. It...mostly worked. He was bending forward less than before, anyway. She stepped back from the lat machine and set her hands on her hips. "I think we've made some good progress today. Junior's really missing out!"

"Who?" Larry's arms relaxed at the wrong time and almost pulled him back up with the bar. "Oh! Right. Uh, yeah. That kid wouldn't know a good workout if it walked up and bit him!" He pulled down again and held it for a moment while he looked at Diana; grinning with a little too much gum to be a casual gesture. "Speakin' of, how long's this one gonna run?"

Diana checked her watch and hummed pensively. "That's a _great_ question. We've been at it for a while, huh?" 

"A bit," he replied, clenching his teeth as he pushed through another rep.

She raised her head to look around the gym, idly tapping her foot. It was never that busy in the middle of a weekday, and many of the machines were open. Unfortunately she had already wrung Larry through most of them, on top of completing her own routine. "All things considered, I'd say…" She approached the lat machine again and leaned down into Larry's space, uncomfortably close, until they could smell the salt clinging to each other. "...it's gonna run as long as I want."

Larry stared at her, a brief flash of fear in his eyes. "Uh, babe, I know I'm a powerful Adonis and all, but I'm starting to wear out over here."

"Don't sell yourself short." She straightened up and considered the back half of the lat pulldown carefully, where all the weights were stacked. "I think I can squeeze a little more out of you."

He let his arms go slack and looked down at his body, slick and dripping. “Don’t think so, girlie. If I’ve got any sweat left to wring out, I’d be surprised.”

“You know what they say about shots you don’t take.” She circled around to the back of the lat machine as Larry pulled in again. Before he could bring up his arms, Diana deftly swapped the key to the next weight up.

The bar snapped forward, bringing most of Larry’s torso with it. He dug his feet into the cushion and pulled back. “Hey! What’s going on back there?”

“Nothing.” She swapped the key down to the next slot. “Keep going, you’re not done with that set.”

“Uh…” The bar snapped up again, and this time he had no hope of pulling it back down. He was sitting upright now, not that he intended to be, straining to hold on to the bar high above his head. “...babe?”

“Talked to your kid earlier,” Diana said evenly. She removed the key again and kept it out long enough for Larry to start to tug down, before sliding it into the next slot and pulling him right back up. His legs were now locked around the table, the only thing keeping him on the machine now that the weights outweighed him.

He craned his head to look behind him. He could see most of her out of the corner of his eye. “Issat right?”

“Yep.” 

“Listen, Daria---”

"Diana.” 

Another slot down. She heard Larry groan through his teeth as the bar tried harder to escape.

“Diana!! Listen, I can explain everything!” He struggled wildly in a futile attempt to drag the bar back down. “He’s just-- Uh-- He’s got a great imagination! Right? Y’know?! See I dropped him on his head as a kid, and he’s a little--”

“Larry…” She had to bend down to reach the key now. He should feel her hand hovering over it.

He gulped audibly.

Her eyes narrowed at him, burning a hole through his back. “I don’t like little boys who _lie_ to me.”

He heard the key clack gently as she pulled it out again. “I d-d-d...I d-didn’t--”

The next slot down was enough to rip Larry’s legs off the table, sending him springing to the top of the lat machine with a sharp _CLANG KA-_ ** _THONK_ ** loud enough to turn several heads. When the world finally stopped spinning he found himself still gripping the pull bar for dear life, now dangling several feet off the ground. “Aheheh…” He grinned helplessly at the rest of the gym as everyone slowly slipped back into whatever they were doing. “Sorry ‘bout that. Guess I don’t know my own strength.”

Diana came back around to the front of the machine. “Smooth,” she chuckled, giving Larry a shove that sent him gently a-swing. He was actually hovering an inch or so above her eye level - not that he could enjoy it right now.

“Listen up, lady!” He kicked his legs to try and stop his momentum, but it wasn’t helping. “What’re you gonna believe? That he’s my kid, or that I’m his whacko basement science clone?”

“I don’t believe either of you,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest. “Funny how you knew what he told me, though.”

Larry froze.

“Not that I care either way.” Diana caught the bar with one hand and stopped him so they were facing each other. “You just happen to be the one within whuppin’ range today.”

“Aheh...uhhh…kinda hard to do that in front of witnesses, innit?” He nodded shakily back towards the rest of the gym.

“Oh, we’re not doing this here.” She raised one hand to cup his cheek and brought her lips to his ear. “Last door at the end of the hall.”

She left him with a gentle nip on the ear and a sharp push that sent him twirling in a tight circle. When he finally managed to kick and struggle himself to a stop several seconds later, Larry watched the door at the far corner of the room click shut.

He hung there for a second, gently swinging above the ground. He pursed his lips as he considered the far door. The marginally less horny portion of his brain argued that he could just leave and completely avoid whatever she had planned for him. When was the next time he’d be alone with her, anyway? When would he see her again at _all_? He didn’t even live here!

He could still feel her teeth on his earlobe. Larry closed his eyes and felt a needy shiver run all the way up his spine. She knew he wouldn’t be able to leave. He knew that she knew, and he was sure that she knew that he knew. He wondered briefly if he was too obvious for his own good, before realizing that it was a stupid question to ask. Of course he was.

Larry finally let go of the bar and plopped onto the cushioned table below. There was an understated brutality that simmered just under her skin - he had felt it from the start, but it was especially obvious now. It sparked Larry’s interest...and needless to say, his boner. He wondered if he was a glutton for punishment, before shaking his head and quickly reminding himself to stop wasting his time with obvious answers. Of _course_ he was. 

Whatever she had in store back there, it was probably going to be rough. He hoped it was, anyway.

 

* * *

 

...Well, maybe he should have rephrased that. Whatever she had in _storage_. 

"A closet?" He asked, hesitantly peeking his head through the door.

“You can’t tell me you’ve never gotten frisky in one of these before.”

“Course I have! Whaddya take me for?” He scratched his nose idly. “It’s just a little conspicuous, don’tcha think?”

“We’ve got more storage in here than we know what to do with,” she said, propping the door open with her hip while she bent over to take off her shoes. “No one uses this one, it’s just where we keep all the yoga mats after the incident.”

“The what?”

“Don’t worry about it.” Diana tossed her shoes into the corner of the closet.

Okay, he wouldn’t. “You could've kept those on. Sporty’s a good look.”

“I don’t know if this crossed your mind, short stuff, but some of us are gonna have a tight fit,” she said evenly, stripping off her socks next. “I don’t want someone finding my shoe prints all over the wall.”

He peered into the closet again, and then looked up (and up, and up) at her. She had a point - he wasn’t going to have an issue with it, but all six feet of Diana sure would. “Those too?”

She held them in her hand for a moment, before shrugging and tossing her socks into the corner with her shoes. “I just think fucking in socks is kind of weird.”

You know what? That's fair. “So, aheh…” he grinned up at her, as if he had totally forgotten the threat that had brought him here to begin with. “Ladies first?”

“Sure.”

Diana placed her foot on his back and gave him a sharp shove, knocking him against the back wall with a short _yelp!_ that was quickly muffled as she shut the door behind them.

The hallway outside was brightly lit, so that just enough light crept through for them to see each other. She was right, there was nothing but yoga mats in here. They had all been stacked on the highest shelves, leaving the floor completely open - something Diana was particularly thankful for right now, because otherwise it would have been an even tighter squeeze. She already had to duck to avoid knocking her head on the top shelf.

Larry couldn’t relate. “So…come here often?”

“Often enough.” Diana sat down on the floor and set her back against the wall, legs open like an invitation.

“Mhm…” He licked his lips as he approached her. “Bet a lot of boys deserve the naughty corner, huh?”

“Some more than others.”

She reached out to grab his arm and slowly pulled him against her chest. With her sitting like this he stood just a smidge over eye level, and was finally in a position to enjoy it. He brought his hands up across her broad shoulders until his fingers could gently trace the tendons in her neck - slim but strong, each time she leaned her head they trembled and flexed under her skin. She was like a finely crafted machine. He wished he could slip his hands in between the gears and pistons and feel every part of her in motion.

Diana lowered her head to run her tongue across the bit of chest peeking out over the low-set collar of Larry’s tank, greedy for the sweat still clinging to his skin. He arched up to give her more of him and nuzzled his face into her nest of thick, natural hair. He closed his eyes and focused on the smell of salt floating in the air, ever more intense with each breath he took. Something else was coming through that he hadn't noticed before; a faint, heady musk about her. Not a dirty smell, but a sharp one - the scent of fresh sweat and adrenaline pooling in unseen places. He took in a deep wavering breath, knees shaking as it hit the back of his palate.

“Larry…” she began, a low rumble that bathed his neck in her hot breath. He shivered in response. “...You do remember this is a punishment, right?”

“...Wuh?”

Suddenly her arm was locked around his neck and he was being flipped end over end. Out of reflex he kicked his legs frantically and felt the bottom of his sneaker connect with the side of her face, _hard_. His blood froze over as he realized what he had done. “Oh god oh shit I’m-- ACK--” Her grip tightened. Her other hand struggled for purchase while he tried to wriggle away. “Sorry! Sorrysorrysorry!!”

“Atta boy,” she growled into his ear. Larry managed to squirm out of her locked arm, giving her a hot second to wipe away the thin line of blood he had knocked out of her mouth. “Fight me for it.”

She tried to flip him over again, so he hooked a leg around her neck and twisted himself upright. One foot clonked against her stomach, doing absolutely zip shit even with his sneaks on. She got up onto her knees for extra leverage and locked a hand onto his thigh, fingers digging deep into his skin and drawing out a startled yelp. He swatted her hand away with his free leg but she had already grabbed a fistful of hair in return, wrenching his head back until he could see the far wall. She positioned herself between his legs so that they splayed out on either side of her waist, and all he could do was kick uselessly at the air. Occasionally the heel of his shoe would thump against her back, but it wasn't a bother. She liked it when they struggled.

She used both hands to lock his arms above his head. His hips were raised and pressed flush against her abs - she could feel his cock twitch against her stomach through his tight little shorts. Larry squirmed desperately as she eyed him up and down, predatory, licking her lips as if deciding which part of him to tear apart first. It was hard to parse the fear and excitement boiling in his stomach, leaving him shuddering in anticipation as she leaned in. His heart pounded in his ears, his brain racing as he imagined what she was about to do to him.

...He could have never imagined she’d stick her entire face in his armpit.

Larry blinked. Hello? I’m sorry?? Was this how the kids did sex these days? Diana nuzzled into his unkempt pit hair and breathed in deep through her nose. When she finally exhaled in a long, shuddering breath, he couldn’t fight the little twang of excitement that jumped into his chest. Oh this was weird. Why was this so weird. 

“God you smell so good,” she said before taking another deep huff. “Almost wish I’d worked you harder.”

Did he? His face burned. Each time she breathed in his scent her whole body shuddered like she’d taken a bump off something magical, and each time it wound Larry’s coil a little tighter. She dragged her mouth across a bare and particularly sweaty patch of skin under his arm, and he felt a hot wave of shame and ecstasy wash over him.

“I...th-thanks?” He stared into the ceiling and concentrated on sounding as not-horny as possible. “I dunno if I get it.”

She freed herself from Larry’s pit and looked at him pointedly. “Oh?”

He shrugged. Well, as much as he could with his arms pinned.

Diana flashed a smile at him, a thin glint of teeth catching the light from under the closet door. “I’ll give you a crash course.”

Suddenly his arms were free. Suddenly he was being flipped again. He didn’t have enough time to escape, and when the world finally stopped again he found himself locked under her arm. Her legs twisted around his, trapping him in position. His arms were mostly available, but what was he even going to do with those? He couldn’t make a dent in her.

She clenched, pushing his face into her armpit. “Take a whiff, boy.”

Gross! No thanks. Larry held his breath, and Diana doubled down. His face ground against her short, course pit hair - leftovers after a week or so of forgetting to shave...or maybe neglecting to, in case something like this happened. “Don’t play so hard to get!” A free hand slipped under his shirt. Her fingers brushed lightly against the top curve of his stomach, and Larry tried to squirm away to no avail. “You’re not gonna win this one, anyway.”

She dug into his side, and Larry almost lost his breath. Her fingers scrambled and he whined through his teeth, shaking his head into her pit. That wasn’t fair. Nothing about this was fair! He already couldn’t hold his breath forever, she was just speeding him towards the inevitable.

His face was starting to go a worrying shade of purple when she hit the motherload; this perfect swath of skin under his belly that was especially sensitive, that melted Larry into a shivering pile of mush soon as she touched it. She dragged her fingers across and then kneaded into him mercilessly, over and over until Larry snorted and giggled and struggled and groaned his way into a big fat L.

“Gah-HAH! AHAHahahohgod ohmyGOODD STOP!! STOPSTOPST- MMPH--”

Diana cracked down again, forcing his face even harder into her pit than before. He gasped, and in that moment her thick musk flooded all of his senses at once. He struggled, but it was short lived.

She smelled... _amazing_. He never would’ve thought. Larry took a more stable breath in through his nose, and the primal smell of hot sweat curled around his brain like mist. It was pleasant when he had smelled it faintly earlier, but it was intoxicating straight from the source. He breathed in again, and a part of his brain he didn’t understand lit up like arson at the fireworks factory as a fresh wave of pheromones swept in. If she used deodorant today, it wasn’t enough of it - not that he cared anymore.

He took another breath. His body went slack and shivering under her. She loosened her grip on him, but Larry didn’t come back up. “You get it now?”

“I’m...a-ah…” Another huff, and a particularly heady whiff of musk hit him like a crack to the jaw. His legs shook. His head spun. “Mm…”

Diana chuckled knowingly. She untangled her legs from his, confident that he wasn’t going anywhere any time soon. She wasn’t wrong - instead of taking advantage of the freedom, he simply scooted himself into a more comfortable position to bury himself under her arm. “Of course you do…” she purred, bringing her hand around to stroke him gently through his shorts. 

He was panting now, his jaw hanging slack as he took in whiff after breath after huff of her, each hit ricocheting around in his skull like a bullet. Drool pooled over the edge of his lips to ooze onto the floor, and Diana sneered at him from high above. “What a dirty little slut you are,” she told him evenly, and as if to prove it Larry pressed in and ran the flat of his tongue across the deepest, rankest part of her armpit. The sharp taste of salt and filth made his cock twitch against Diana’s palm. He would have been ashamed, if he had any working brain cells left.

Diana curled her fingers around his bulge, and Larry whimpered desperately. He was already entranced, but the devil on his shoulder told him that he could have more. More wonderful, pungent sweat smells. More strange sex chemicals that his horny animal brain could only faintly comprehend. Oh yes, he knew exactly where more was.

Larry pulled away from her. Diana stopped stroking and gave him a weird look. “What? Did I break something earlier?"

He didn’t say anything. He wasn’t even looking at her face. Diana followed his gaze down to her crotch.

She tensed. Larry looked up to meet her eyes. He shuffled a little in no particular direction. “I dare you,” she growled at him.

So he did; and to his credit, it was a good shot.

He lunged at her, hands scrambling for her waistband. She kicked at him and missed, giving him the chance to push her to the ground and pull her sweats down far enough to see the topmost curve of her ass. This was the wrong _side_ goddamnit! Diana bucked and rolled Larry out onto the floor, and when she sat up again he launched himself against her and sent them both back down to the ground. He was at her pants again, and managed to pull them down past her crotch before her leg connected with his chest.

He hit the back wall hard, and before he could get up again her foot smashed into his face.

"You're a tough one! Color me surprised." Diana propped herself onto her elbows to look at him. Laid out on the ground she almost reached from one end of the closet to the other, leaving just enough room to pin Larry against the far wall. "Your kid could learn a thing or two."

"Quit callin' him that," he growled, slightly muffled.

"And _you_ could learn not to talk back." Diana ground her sole roughly into his face and he whimpered from the building pressure in his head, trapped between her foot and the wall behind him. He had to figure something out, because otherwise she was in a perfect position to smash his skull open like a watermelon. Not that he was opposed to that, exactly, but he had things he wanted to get done beforehand. Fuck a few more times. Finish that book he was reading. Answer that text from mom. You know, bucket list stuff.

She pushed in again. He hissed in through his teeth and another sharp whiff of musk hit him, different than before; not as intense, now mixed with the lingering smell of shoe rubber. He thought briefly about an article he had read several years ago that had sort of stuck with him - he didn't read a lot of those, but having words like 'sex' and 'erotic' in the title was enough to make him click on anything.

More grinding. This sucked, and his nose was starting to get sore. Why was he thinking about this shit? He remembered that it was a nifty little piece about unknown, unusual, or unpopular erogenous zones. Weird stuff like parts of the scalp, wrists for some people, occasionally feet, sometimes behind the…

Oh. Aw, man. Really? Fine.

Larry grabbed her foot and pried it off his face, just far enough to relieve the pressure. Before she could press in again, Larry dropped any dignity he may have had in his entire life and ran the broadest part of his tongue _all_ the way up the sole of her foot.

Diana froze and released a shuddering little sigh that had no right coming out of a woman like her. They stared at each other, shocked and terrified, until a mischievous grin began to slowly creep across Larry's face.

"Don't."

"Don't what?" He pressed both thumbs into the deepest part of her arch and Diana tried to jerk back weakly, maybe half-heartedly? She snarled at him and he answered with an amused hum. "Oh, don't do _this?_ "

He slipped his mouth over the inner arch, and her whole body shivered as his lips dragged across the soft skin just under the ball of her foot. The highest impact areas were callused over and Larry knew they wouldn't do as much damage, but the little hidden spots like this were still wonderfully soft, sensitive, and exploitable. 

He gripped her toes and pulled back so the skin of her sole stretched taut. “I can’t _believe_ you,” she meant to growl, but it faded into a low whine when his tongue stepped back into action, running along the vulnerable space between the ball and heel. She shuddered a little harder with each pass he made; at first tracing the edges ever so lightly with the tip and eventually running the flat of his tongue back and forth across her sensitive arch, his mouth hinged open so she could feel his breath on her sole and his teeth scrape across the outcroppings of rough callus. 

“I’m not the one gettin’ off to it,” he giggled, letting up just long enough to press a kiss into the soft pad of her heel and draw out another shaky breath from her. “You’re kind of a freak, aren’tcha baby?” He moved up and pressed his thumbs into the very top of her sole, and her toes splayed out of their own accord. Their eyes met again and he ran his tongue slowly across his lips. “I like it.”

She shook her head frantically, but he slid his mouth down anyway. Hot breath enveloped several toes at once and Diana covered her eyes with a strained groan, an equal mix of shame and pleasure sending waves of heat straight to her head. One of her hands snaked down into her underwear and hesitated just above her crotch. She wasn't sure she was ready to let anyone see her get off to this, let alone _him_. God it was embarrassing. You'd think letting a man lick your feet would put you at an advantage on principle alone.

Larry eyed her critically and grumbled through a mouthful of foot that wasn't his own for once. His teeth sank down ever so lightly into the knuckles of her toes, but her hand still hovered over her entrance. That wouldn't do at _all_. He wanted her warmed up before he went down under. The thought alone was enough to make his mouth water, and an errant trail of drool dribbled past his lips and across the bridge of her foot. Diana jerked back slightly, but he held fast. He wasn't opposed to fighting gross with grosser.

Larry snaked his tongue between her toes, savouring and circling them one by one, and Diana's fingers finally delved in. He knew that was a dirty play, but it certainly worked didn't it?

The smell wasn't as strong down here, but the taste was _pungent_. Holy lord there was so much salt. There was a primal, earthy nature to it; a funk coloured by all the sweat trapped between skin and shoe rubber that he couldn't get enough of, much to his horror. Even with his advantage there was an undercurrent of confusion and embarrassment that he couldn't shake, but that made his cock throb against the confines of his shorts. Diana moaned somewhere far in front of him, and Larry gave a pleased little huff through his nose. At least he wasn't the only one.

He closed his lips around her and brought his hands back into play. While his thumbs kneaded up into the ball of her foot, his tongue swiped over the lovely soft space where sole met digits. Diana gasped sharply and writhed under his touch, her fingers plunging in deeper, her thumb circling her clit. Her toes wriggled against his tongue and Larry forced himself to stop and picture his elderly 5th grade math teacher naked, lest he blow his load right there. Oh that was weird. Oh he didn't expect that to hit so hard. This was starting to feel like a Pyrrhic victory - in which he had gained the upper hand, but had also given himself brain worms in the process.

He removed his mouth, a thin line of drool following behind. Diana was still hard at work, and Larry decided it was time to make moves before one of them blew their top. He didn't know about _her_ , but Larry Laffer wasn't here to get his rocks off just sitting around licking feet.

He set her foot down and shuffled onto his knees, carefully crawling between her legs and towards the promised land. She either didn’t notice or didn’t give a shit, and soon Larry had edged close enough to watch her fingers at work. She pulled out her index and pointer, carrying a trail of glistening fluid with them, before slipping back in slowly, agonizingly. Larry licked his lips and gave a horny, shuddering sigh. Oh he wanted it. Oh _please_. He set his hands on her thighs and hovered just over her wonderful dripping cunt...at which point she wrapped both hands around his neck, and Larry realized that she had definitely noticed, and definitely gave a shit.

His face met the floor. Diana grabbed his legs and stood him upside down, while her own legs locked around his head. His face was smothered in her sculpted calves and-- god _fucking_ **_damn it_ ** he was facing the wrong way! “Sucker,” she sneered at him, and his extremely rude response was muffled by the walls of muscle wrapped around his face.

“You like playing dirty, huh?” He felt his shorts slip off, and then his undies. Diana adjusted his legs so that they hung over her each shoulder, giving her full access to his junkular area. He could feel her breath on his nethers and he wriggled briefly before her nails dug into his hips, putting a swift stop to it. “I’ll show you dirty.”

One hand pulled his balls forward to expose his entire taint and then her lips were on him, dragging and sucking along the sensitive swath of skin. She nuzzled in to take a deep, _deep_ huff and her whole body shivered in tandem with his. It was intense down here, where all the sweat and pheromones had dripped down and been trapped between so many folds of flesh over the course of their workout. She ran her tongue into the crevice where his taint and balls met, and the pungent taste of stagnant sweat mixed with the desperate little moan from between her legs spurred her on. She licked again, across the broadest part of his taint, up and down the length, each time coming dangerously, maddeningly close to his asshole or his nuts but never quite making it there. All the while she left his poor cock unattended, bobbing freely in the air as she punished him, as her tongue and lips worked in tandem on his taint while his hips bucked and rolled of their own accord. A dribble of precum dripped onto his chest and ran down across his neck, and he made a muffled whimpering noise.

“Mmleashe…”

The flat of her tongue rolled across again, and Larry whined louder.

“Mphianaph--”

She loosened up her legs just enough to see his face, red as a fire hydrant and streaked with his own pre. “Come again?”

“D-D-D…”

She moved her mouth over his grundle, eyeing him sharpley.

“D-Diana…”

She pulled back again.

“Let me…” His chest heaved. He looked up at her, eyes begging. “Let me eat you out…”

She raised her eyebrows. “Why should I.”

“P-Please, I wuhh...I wahannt it…”

Diana hummed pensively. She ran a finger lightly over his taint, now slick with her own saliva. “How much do you want it?”

“Bad…” An errant drop of precum plopped onto his nose and ran down to his cheek. “I want it b-bad…”

She tilted her head in mock confusion. “What do you want again?”

He shook his head, beside himself with frustration. “I w-wanna eat you out!”

“Oh?” Her hand left his taint and trailed across his thigh instead. “You should tell me about it.”

His lip quivered. He never was good with essays. “I-- Wuh-- I’m--”

“I’ll help you,” she said, with a benevolent smile that Larry found _extremely_ threatening. “You want to lick my pussy.”

“I wanna--” He was cut off by his own strained whimper. The blood was starting to pool in his head. No no, the one he was standing on right now. “I w-wanna lick your pussy.”

“You _do_ ,” she echoed, a statement of fact more than affirmation. “You want to eat out my hot, wet cunt.”

He squeezed his eyes shut and panted through the mantra. “I wuhh-- I wanna eat your h-hot…” Oh christ he couldn’t even remember what she said. His skull was on the verge of explosion. “Your w-wet c-c-c-cunt.”

Close enough. “You want to lick me clean,” she continued, digging her nails into his thighs with renewed force. “Every last drop.”

"I wuh-- I w-want--" He grit his teeth. “E-Every luh-- last d-d-drop.”

Diana finally let him go, and Larry’s lower half plopped onto the floor. All the blood in his head finally flowed out to the rest of his body, and he gave a long sigh of relief as the pounding in his temples subsided.

His vision finally unblurred itself just in time for Diana to finish stripping off her sweats. He attempted to sit up, but she quickly pushed him back down and silently kneeled over his face. Larry gazed up into her cunt, full and plush and glistening with fluid, and a shiver of excitement ran up his body from toe to tip. Finally. Finally finally _finally_. She lowered herself and he craned his neck to meet her on the way down, releasing a contented sigh as his lips met hers.

She was _soaked_. It was everything he dreamed of and more. A flood of endorphins ripped through Larry’s brain as he parted his lips and took in her soft folds. Her pussy was beautifully warm and sopping wet, and he hummed in delight as the taste of musk and sweat and myriad fluids coated his tongue. She hadn’t shaved, and he didn’t care - Larry buried himself deeper and reveled in the sensation of her soft, thick bush against his cheeks. His tongue ran around the rim of her canal and she moaned somewhere high above him, bracing her hands against the ground as he made loop after agonizing loop around the entrance. When he finally slipped in she bucked her hips against his face, urging him to go deeper. He dragged his lips over her inner labia as his tongue descended in a slow spiral, covering every inch of her walls on the way down. She tasted so good - so much better than he could have imagined. Warm and heady, with an occasional odd twinge of sweetness that he was very familiar with, but could never place no matter how many times he did this. He breathed in through his nose and the combination of her taste and her smell made his cock throb dangerously. 

He couldn’t get any deeper, no matter how hard she was rutting against his face. He pulled his tongue back, dragging it along the wall on his way out, and ran the flat of it in an arc across her inner labia. He flicked the tip once against her clit and she gasped sharply, dragging her fingers against the smooth flooring. He circled it several times, a little tighter, a little faster with each loop. He curled around her clit and felt it pulse against his tongue, hot and aching. Her hands dug into his hair as she leaned into him, her breathing coming faster with each twist of his tongue. When the flat of it dragged across it ripped a low, aching moan out of her chest. He did it again, and all the muscles in her body shuddered in anticipation. He lapped hungrily at her clit, feeling her clench and quiver against his lips as he pushed her closer, and closer, and closer until--

She was a squirter, as Larry quickly learned. When she came, Diana clamped his head between her thighs and pounded against his open mouth, forcing him to take in all of it. Every last drop.

He couldn't swallow until she finally rolled off of him. She thumped her back against the wall and they both floated around in silence for a while, listening to each other breathe. Larry ran his tongue across his lips to catch any bits of her left over, not noticing the rivulets dripping down his chin and pooling on the floor below.

"Whh...what time is it…" Diana squinted at her watch for entirely too long. Her understanding of numbers trickled back in slowly. "Crap...I've got a client in a few minutes." Larry, still splayed out on his back, watched her get to her feet...eventually. Her legs wobbled her back down to the ground on the first attempt. "That took longer than I thought it would," she grumbled, after successfully standing up.

"You're welcome~" Larry sang from his spot on the floor. Diana rolled her eyes and went about putting her sweats back on.

He didn’t start to worry until she grabbed her socks and shoes, at which point he finally sat up. “Uh...we got a little unfinished business, don’t we?”

She gave him a weird look. “...No?”

Larry looked down at his erect cock, then back up at her.

“I don’t see how that’s my problem.”

“C’mon babe, you can’t just leave me like this!” He motioned to his crotch. “Not after I rocked your world!”

Diana groaned in response. She bent down to begin slipping a sock on...but stopped just short, a spark of inspiration flashing across her face. She stood back up slowly and tucked her footwear under one arm. “You’re right.”

“...I am? I am!” He nodded quickly. “So, uh, how’sabout one more for the road?”

“Sure.” She took a heavy step towards him, and Larry’s smile dropped off his face. “I was thinking I’d just leave you hanging as part of your punishment...” Another step. Larry scrambled backwards until he hit the wall. “...But I have a better idea.”

He didn’t think to close his legs fast enough, and Diana’s foot thumped against his crotch with startling force. He whined frantically as her heel pressed into his balls, the rest of her sole pinning his cock up against his stomach.

“No…” She parted her toes so they slipped around his head, already covering them in a new round of precum. “Oh god, at least use your hand…”

Diana silently shook her head at him.

She slid the ball of her foot against his shaft and drew out a tight, wobbling sigh. Her toes pressed against his head, and Larry squeezed his eyes shut as an embarrassing moan escaped his mouth. He felt like he was having a nightmare. Somehow getting off to this felt even weirder to him than licking feet. She moved her foot lower so that her toes wrapped around his shaft and the ball of her foot settled against his nuts, rubbing up and down his cock with increasing ease as pre poured out onto her foot. She dragged her toes all the way down to press her big toe roughly into the base of his shaft and keep it there for several seconds, watching his cock pulse and twitch with mounting desperation. 

When she returned to stroking it was with renewed ferocity, leaning hard into the spots where his cock pressed up against the curve of his stomach. Larry raised his hips into her foot, panting and writhing and burying his face in his hands so he didn’t have to watch it happen. Every time she reached the top of his cock she clenched her toes and smothered his head with them, and every time his breathing got a little faster. She shifted her weight and angled her foot differently, and suddenly a particularly rough patch of callus was grinding against his dick. The texture was intense - he could feel every tiny dip and divot and tag and rip as it slid across his skin. The mix of stimuli melded together into what he could almost describe as a tickle; pleasant on the first pass, and increasingly maddening with each subsequent one. When a telltale shake started in his legs, she set her sights on the tip. She pressed again and again into his head using the top of her sole, her toes clenching and unclenching while she applied pressure in a steady rhythm. He rolled his hips a final time and all at once the ball of her foot pressed in, her toes curled around his head, his cock rubbed up against the bottom curve of his belly, and his coil finally snapped.

He shuddered and sputtered and moaned through an orgasm that was much longer than he’d ever admit, all the while keeping his hands plastered over his eyes. When it was all over he let out a pathetic little whine and stayed there for a little while, curled in on himself while his brain booted back up. He wanted to say he hated it, but the jury was still out on a lot of the things he had done today. He supposed learning really was a lifelong process.

Something thumped onto his chest. When he finally uncovered his eyes he was met with Diana’s foot again, soaked in his own cum. He looked up and met her even gaze. She didn’t say anything, and she didn’t need to. Larry brought her foot up to his mouth and went about his duty.

He didn’t look at her, but he knew she was watching him the whole time. Jesus christ he had gotten it _everywhere_. He didn’t think he had cum so hard, but his tongue kept finding new stores of jizz stuck between her toes. He ticked off all the big landmarks in his head as he licked her clean. Arch, heel, ball, toes. Ankle? Yep, he had made it all the way up there too. He was almost proud of that one. 

He finally released her foot, and she inspected it as well as she could from six feet up. He had missed a spot. That was okay - she reached down for his discarded shorts and used them to wipe off the last bits of cum before tossing them onto his stomach.

While Diana slipped her socks and shoes back on, Larry wobbled onto his knees and scooted across the closet to grab his undies. “Good workout, shortstack. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still pissed at all Larrys involved...” she began, setting her hands on her hips, though sounding a little perkier than before. Larry looked up at her shyly from the floor, and she smiled down at him. It wasn’t as threatening this time, but Larry still gripped the fabric of his shorts just a bit tighter. “...But you’re pretty feisty! I haven’t had any boys fight back in a hot minute.” He flinched as she reached down towards him, but she only ruffled his hair. ”We should have another sesh sometime!”

As she opened the closet door, Larry loudly cleared his throat.

“Gratis, of course.”

Click.

 

* * *

 

He shuffled back through the gym with his head low, angling his body in whichever direction would show less of the cum stain splattered across his shorts. When he crossed through Diana’s line of sight she gave him a cheery wave from the bench press, and Larry lifted a hand weakly in her direction.

When he finally escaped onto the streets of Lost Wages he breathed a deep sigh of relief. By no means was that the weirdest sexcapade in his life, but it certainly made the top ten list.

_You’re pretty feisty!_

Larry’s face went a little red. He was, wasn’t he? Despite the big filthy gauntlet he had just run, Larry couldn’t help but feel proud of himself for his display of moxie. He replayed the wrestling bits in his head and considered his actions. He could've thrown his arms around more. Maybe held on tighter when he had her in that leg lock. Should he have hit harder? She certainly didn't seem to mind when he had accidentally clocked her near the start. Thinking about it started a familiar wobble start in his legs. Not that he got off to hitting women in particular, but he could _certainly_ get off to the idea of spending foreplay fighting for dominance.

Larry grinned up towards nothing in particular, his face still a little flush after everything. He was sure there was room for improvement, so he’d just have to revisit his strategy later. He’d win the next round - he was sure of it.


	10. Fuck Me Yourself, Coward

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is...the faintest whiff of what *might* be dubcon near the start of this one, in the same way that you'd say LaCroix is flavoured like anything. It's not enough to tag for, but worth mentioning just in case. Rest assured that both parties hop on the express train to mutual bangtown pretty much immediately, because if anyone was put on this earth to fuck himself it's Larry goddamn Laffer.

_Ratat-tat-rap_

Larry glared at the door over the top of his phone. If he concentrated hard enough, maybe he could set it on fire and send up his gross little clone with it.

It wasn’t working. Larry sighed. “What’s the password?”

Who cares. He was already opening the door as he answered. “Ken sent me!”

Larry silently went back to fiddling with his phone.

His fucking stupid jackass counterpart tossed his gym bag off to the side and hopped onto the loveseat with an overt groan, draping himself across the cushions. “Hoooolee _shit_.”

Larry Reboot glanced at him. He was a little disheveled - he didn’t have his jacket on, his shirt was only half tucked, his belt was undone, and was he missing a sock? He looked like he had gotten dressed in the dark, and in a hurry. “Tough one?”

“Oh buddy,” Larry shook his head into the ceiling. “You’ve got _no_ _idea_.”

He narrowed his eyes, but said nothing. Whatever. Diana could’ve run him harder, as far as Larry was concerned. He could be dead, for instance, and maybe that would’ve been enough to satisfy him.

The air vibrated strangely. Larry Prime eventually regained enough movement in his limbs to prop himself upright again, and he considered his gym bag against the wall. He figured he should probably get around to putting everything away...maybe? Ehh, maybe not. That thing was a pent up bomb of cum and B.O. by now, and he wasn’t ready to unleash that on the world. “What’s new?” he said eventually, not out of curiosity but congeniality.

Larry shrugged noncommittally. He hadn’t actually left the Goggle front page for several minutes - the spike of anger and anxiety that rolled through him every few seconds made it hard to concentrate on anything.

Larry Prime pressed his lips into a thin line, frustrated. He crossed his arms behind his head, which would have been a casual gesture if his shoulders weren’t so tense. “Look at me, kid.”

The taller Larry set his phone face down on the bed with an emphatic _thump_. He was looking at him, alright.

“So, like…” Larry checked his nails, also a much less casual act than normal. “You got a reason for blowing my cover today?”

Tall Larry’s eyes went wide. His first few seconds were spent sputtering and stammering while he tried to search for words in the face of astonishment. “What-- The-- Your uh-- Your c-c-c--” Larry Prime rolled his hand impatiently, and Larry Reboot’s brain finally strung together enough words for a sentence. “Your c-cover? _You’re_ mad _I_ blew your cover?!”

“Uh...yeah? Duh??” Larry shook his head at him in disbelief. “I had a smooth in with your sporty ladyfriend there, and then you go tellin’ her about all this science bullshit! You know how awkward that’s gonna make round two?”

“You-- You’re such a--” Larry Reboot slid himself off the side of the bed and onto his feet. “I can’t believe you!”

“Me?!” The older of them echoed.

“ _YOU!_ ” He spat back. “ _You’re_ getting on _my_ case? For telling Diana the truth?” Larry pointed an accusing finger at him. “After _you_ lied to her?!”

“Oh, spare me!” He threw his hands up. “Your goody two shoes act doesn’t hold water here, kiddo. I know my track record of lying for pussy by your age.”

“That’s different! That’s not telling some rando chick at the disco I’m a billionaire or a supermodel or an astrophysicist or whatever!” He kept taking steps towards his counterpart on the other side of the room, whether he realized it or not. “You lied to _my_ friend, and now it’s a lie _I’ve_ gotta clean up! _I’m_ the one who _lives here!_ And then you-- you--” He stopped walking as a strange half hiccup, almost sob escaped his chest. His fists clenched until it felt like his nails would go straight through his palms. “--you told her you’re my dad! _Our_ dad!”

Larry Prime eyed him evenly for a moment, and the first thing out of his mouth was a curt, cruel laugh. “Is _that_ what’s got your undies in a bunch? I guess I was still all hung up on that when I was young and stupid, too.”

“Don’t _patronize_ me!” He fairly shrieked. “I’m not stupid for thinking maybe the guy who went through all the same shit I did would handle this with a little tact!”

“Screw you, tact.” The older man got to his feet and cocked his head at his taller clone, hands shoved deep in his pockets. “It was a means to an end.”

“So what, you just expected me to pick up your lie? _That_ lie, of all lies?”

“Yes? Maybe I thought you’d be a little farther along dealing with those daddy issues.”

“This is about more than just daddy issues!”

“Well, not much more.” He sneered up at him. “Here’s a hint from the future; get over it, you’ll live longer.”

“Oh, come off it!” Larry Reboot threw his hands up in frustration. “You’re such a selfish little prick! No wonder you don’t have any friends!”

Larry Prime’s smile dropped.

There was a flash of regret across the taller man’s face, but it was quickly replaced with a new burst of anger. “That’s r-r-- that’s right!” He stammered, taking another step forward. His smaller self shuffled back, shoulders bristling. “You’re selfish, and a jerk, and you _use_ people! You even used _yourself!_ ” Larry Reboot pointed at himself for emphasis. “No wonder no one sticks around! You’re all alone, and it’s _all_ _your fault!_ ”

Larry Prime ground his teeth together roughly, his lips pulled back into a snarl. “That’s not stuff to say into the mirror, kid.”

Larry Reboot dropped his hand, confused.

“I think your goodie-goodie routine sucks,” he growled, “And I don’t think it’ll last.”

“It’s-- It’s not a routine.”

“No, maybe it’s not.” Larry Prime took a step forward. Larry Reboot straightened his back, no matter how much he wanted to shrink away. "Maybe you're just young and full of piss n' vinegar, huh? You wanna leave something good behind, don'tcha?"

The younger Larry huffed, but didn’t say anything. 

“Course you do. So did I for a while! You’ll get tired of it.” They were right up on each other now...as much as possible, anyway. The height difference would continue to make things difficult. “Underneath your big Everyone’s Friend act, I think you’re just as shallow as me. One day you’re gonna learn that taking what you want is easier than being nice.”

Larry shook his head, and his shorter clone nodded in turn. “You’re gonna drive everyone away, and you won't even notice till they're all gone.”

He shook harder. “Shut up.”

"You’re gonna end up in my spot.” A flash of teeth, another curt laugh. "The same man comes to the same conclusion, in the end."

He balled his fists again, his face twisted in frustration. “I’m not you.”

He tilted his head back smugly. “Not yet.”

He was too close. Larry felt his back touch a wall that didn’t exist, and he just couldn’t take it anymore. His hand shot out and connected with his shoulder, or chest, whatever, he couldn’t tell behind the flash of rage that overtook his vision in that moment. Larry Prime stumbled back and caught himself on the arm of the loveseat, staring up at his younger self with shock and amusement in equal cuts. “Poor baby,” he cooed, uprighting himself as his younger counterpart closed the gap. “Did I strike a chord? Hurt your widdle feelings?” He shoved the taller Larry roughly with one hand, but wasn’t capable of making him stumble in the same way; another obstacle of the height difference. “Hearing the truth sucks when you’re all wrapped up in pretending to care about your little friends, huh?”

“Sh-Shut up!”

“Make me!”

The older man shoved him again, and something at the front of Larry’s brain instantly burned up. Both hands were on him this time, and Larry Prime’s shoulder hit the near wall with a dull _thump_. He looked up again to see tears brimming in his eyes, but they both knew it wasn’t weakness. He always cried when he was angry, and he always hated himself for it.

After several long moments, Larry pushed out an amused huff through his nose. “Argue with me.”

Larry froze.

He grinned. “Call me a liar.”

His eyes darted away. “You’re a-- You're--.”

“Do it!” he barked. His taller clone flinched, but didn't finish. Larry Prime shook his head. “You can’t even convince yourself.”

He frowned deeply. His hands were starting to shake.

“You're right; I went through all the same shit you did. Then I went through thirty more years of it,” he growled, his back flush against the wall. “I’m the closest thing to truth you’ll ever get.”

An errant tear spilled over onto his cheek. His mouth curled back into a grimace. He couldn’t look him in the eyes anymore.

Larry Prime chuckled under his breath. “You really are just like me.”

“Go fuck yourself!” he shrieked at him with renewed ferocity.

“You first,” he spat back.

He didn't know what happened. His whole head went white hot with anger, and suddenly he was blind again. Larry scrambled for his fly, and in that moment Larry was afraid.

"That's not-- wait--" Larry Prime tried to approach again, but another rough shove sent him backwards. Larry Reboot was already hopping out of his pants as he closed the gap between them, his face hot and flushed with rage, his eyes wild - piercing him. "What are you--"

"Fucking myself," he snarled.

Larry went cold as he watched his thumb slip into the waistband of his underwear. He made a bold attempt to dart past his taller counterpart, but was caught by the shoulders and forced back against the wall again. He squeezed his eyes shut and struggled wildly but couldn't get enough leverage to force him off, even bracing on the bricks behind him. He felt himself pushed down until his legs gave out, sending him to the ground. One hand twisted into his hair and pulled his head up, and then something foreign pressed against his lips. Larry opened his eyes.

He didn't know how he was so hard already. His member bobbed in front of his eyes, held aloft by sheer force of anger. He hadn't expected to hit a nerve so raw and so deep, or maybe he had. Larry couldn't tell anymore, it was hard to focus with his own cock pressed impatiently into his face. It was startling - same girth, same length, same freckle near the base. Exactly the same, despite the profound difference between their bodies. He certainly wasn't any bigger, but it sure felt that way from this angle.

"Open your m-mouth."

He looked up at him. Even with tears streaming down the younger man's face, he felt a little intimidated. He pressed his lips shut, and Larry's head slid roughly against them.

Younger Larry closed his eyes and clenched his jaw. His cock twitched impatiently. "Op-p-pen your fuh-- f-f-fuhcking _m-- mouth._ "

Idiot. This was a bad position to force yourself on someone. He had teeth, you know.

...But would he use them? He wasn't actually sure. 

His fingers dug harder into his scalp, and Larry Prime felt his cock pulse traitorously in the confines of his pants. He opened his mouth just enough to release a pent up sigh, and Larry finally forced his way in.

He felt bigger than he actually was, but the older of them knew it was just the circumstances. Somehow thinking about it that way produced another low throb in his loins. He didn't understand, and he didn't have time to try as Larry began to thrust roughly, clumsily into his mouth. 

“Ah-a-argue with me now,” he stammered through what threatened to be a sob. He didn’t get it either. He heard his own muffled groan below him and shivers ran up his spine. It was so strange and so enticing; hearing these noises that were familiar but now foreign, from a different angle, with his mouth full of hot cock - _his_ cock, he had to remind himself. The juxtaposition was confusing, but the confusion excited him in ways he had never felt and never considered. How could he? No one exactly woke up expecting this to happen. 

They looked at each other in that moment, and the vulnerability in his eyes sent a hot pulse through Larry's head. Did he look like that when everyone else fucked him? Had he looked up at Nari with the same needy little half-lidded glance when she was toying with him the other night? God he hoped so. Every time a wave of pleasure hit him he would squirm just a bit against his taller clone's grip and this luscious little wound up noise would escape from the corner of his mouth and it was _delicious_ , oh it was like magic. He was so good. He couldn't believe he was so good.

Larry Prime, on the other side of the world by all accounts, looked up to see a version of himself so much younger and so much less tired -  forceful and domineering in this moment - and it took immeasurable focus to keep himself from blowing his load right there. Why was this happening? One particularly eager thrust raked across the base of his tongue and the taller Larry _mooaannned_ somewhere above him and a gush of pre dribbled out into his mouth and Jesus CHRIST why was this _happening_? Fingers that were his own but also weren't curled and uncurled in his hair and against his neck and they were so much more capable than his, not huge and toonish and clumsy but slender and deft and when they pressed deep into his skin all of his nerves burst into sparklers. He eked out a strained whine around a mouthful of his own cock and heard the same noise in return far above him, back and forth like an echo chamber. It resonated strangely in his head and holy shit he was _so_ hard about it, over absolutely nothing but the sound of himself from somewhere that wasn’t himself. He felt like he was going nuts.

He might have been. In a split decision Larry Prime gripped his clone’s hips and pulled him deep into his mouth, all the way down to the hilt. There was a gasp of shock and then a tight, oh so _tight_ little groan that blew straight through his head like a shotgun and lord almighty he had no idea he sounded so _good_ during sex. His tongue swirled around his length in just the way he knew he liked it and Larry's hands untangled from his hair so he could beat his fists against the wall, it was so overwhelming. It was like being stuck in a feedback loop. His lips would close around his cock and pull up the shaft and Larry would make some moaning groaning noise hovering above him, which would in turn embolden his older self to pull him back in again and smother him with the flat of his tongue, and then the taller one would start an even louder racket and pound harder against his face, older Larry would push back and find another spot that drove him nuts, more sounds and desperate wriggling, back and forth, so on, et cetera. They were a pendulum, gathering ever more momentum each time the arm swung from one apex to the other. One last time Larry pressed himself deep against his mouth, and as his fingers dug hard into his hips and his legs started to shake and his tongue slipped up the length of his cock the machine finally came to a shattering, sputtering stop.

Fireworks, and then fog. When Larry’s vision unblurred he was staring at the brick wall. He felt the hands release his hips, so he shuffled back on his knees and let his flaccid cock slide out of his smaller counterpart’s mouth, carrying a sloppy trail of cum and drool with it. Larry Prime looked away and a heavy gulp split the silence surrounding them.

The tears were back, dripping onto the ground, across their legs. The younger man wrapped his shaking arms around the other and curled in on himself. “I c-can’t stand you,” he sobbed, as the other Larry silently slid his arms across his back. “I h-- hate it. I _hate_ you.”

Larry said nothing. He fought down the sob building in his chest and buried his face in his shoulder, and they sat there for a while. The space between them was warm. The air was still.

His legs started to cramp. Life beyond thirty had turned kneeling into a chore. Eventually Larry Reboot gathered enough of himself together to readjust, shuffling around so that he was sitting cross-legged instead. He pulled the smaller man into his lap and Larry Prime allowed it, for reasons neither of them quite understood. He slid a trembling hand under his chin and guided him up so that their eyes met again. Were they always such a nice shade of blue? Maybe it was the angle. Maybe the tears. The taller Larry cocked his head ever so slightly to the side and leaned in. He didn’t know where he was going. He didn’t know why his shorter self was stretching up to meet him. Their lips connected, gently, and both of them took in the same sharp breath as if they’d startled each other. They parted again, but only briefly. The taller Larry leaned back in and the other hummed softly into his mouth as he accepted.

He wondered if he should feel guilty. If he should feel dirty. The taste of cum on his lips-- his _own_ cum on _his_ own lips, it was surreal. His tongue tentatively traced the front of his teeth, almost sheepish, and as if to show him better his counterpart’s tongue curled past his own and swiped roughly against the inner walls of his mouth. Larry pulled his shorter self against his chest and hiked up his knees to make a higher seat for him. Larry Prime leaned in and the other rocked backwards, balancing on the back of his hips while they kissed. They traded the advantage back and forth as one would open wider and the other would shrink back, before pushing his tongue in and pulling out a needy whine from his clone. A final insistent push tipped tall Larry over onto his back, carrying the smaller one with him. Larry Prime readjusted so that he was straddling his chest, bringing their lips together again and swallowing any sounds of protest the other Larry might have been making. He didn't care; frankly this kid could just fucking deal with it right now, because at least _he_ wasn't shoving his cock down his throat like _some_ people. 

He ground his hips against his bony chest as his dick throbbed insistently through his underwear. There was no softness afforded here; just a flat, harsh plane sprinkled with precious little hair. Larry scooted back to rut against the concave space formed by his ribs instead - the costal arch, he would have called it had he known the word. It was better here. There was a gentle incline that connected this space with his stomach, and as Larry slid against it he left a slick trail from the ever-spreading stain in the crotch of his pants. He was only slightly surprised to learn that this was as sensitive a spot for his doppelganger as it had always been for him. When he slid against the deepest part of the trench in a long, smooth arc the younger Larry would mumble or moan something and Larry Prime would pull away from the kiss only long enough to let his voice hit the air. Every so often the head of his cock would bump up against the inner edge of his ribs and they'd both gasp into each other's mouths, half shock and half arousal.

Pressure was building in his pants, and the frustration was starting to outweigh the pleasure. Larry Prime pulled back and stood up, eyeing the other man up and down while he stripped everything but his shirt. Larry Reboot mumbled something tired and stretched himself out on the ground, wiry limbs flexing and tangling as they worked out the vague soreness that came with rolling around on the floor. The older man felt a breath hitch in his chest and slowly his hand reached for his own dick, stroking it idly while he watched. Why didn’t he look like that? Why had he spent his whole life at crotch height while this cuck had popped off the conveyor belt at five-foot-whatever, lithe and young and not proportioned like a reject Looney Tunes character? His counterpart released a long sigh and arched back against the ground, his thin chest rising up at the same time that Larry’s thumb pressed roughly against his own shaft. Watching him simply exist was stirring a strange mix of arousal and jealousy in the pit of Larry’s stomach, and he could feel it starting to eat its way out of him. He traced the shaft sort of mindlessly and set his jaw. Fuck this guy, seriously.

Larry Prime swung his leg back across so that he was standing over his taller clone’s head, cock still gripped in one hand. The other looked up at him, mostly dazed, a little nonplussed.

“I think I wanna return the favor,” he said evenly.

He blinked, but did eventually give him a single nod. He supposed he didn’t have room to refuse here. He certainly hadn’t given him any.

Larry dropped onto his knees to straddle his face. The shaft of his cock slid across his lips before he pulled back and repositioned, holding himself steady while the other man braced for entry. He had sort of expected having to eat dick at _some_ point, but he hadn’t expected his first time to be like this.

...Well, _technically_ his first time. The Hell’s Pawn incident was sort of wobbly, but gargoyles didn’t count as far as Larry was concerned

Feeling the tip bump up against his mouth pulled him out of his thoughts. He parted his lips and slowly, gently took in his head. Larry Prime let his legs go slack and his own weight pushed the rest of himself inside with one swift motion, pulling a muffled grunt of surprise out of his clone. He sat there for a moment and let a sigh of relief roll through him while he basked in the humid warmth encompassing his cock.

Was that his queue to do something? He clumsily dragged the flat of his tongue around the head, and Larry Prime gave an amused snort somewhere above him. Larry Reboot grumbled loudly against his cock, and the older man ended what was going to be another rude chuckle with a weak gasp instead. Well, that was sort of fun. The younger Larry had always assumed that was just a tired porn trope, but maybe there was something to be said about talking with your mouth full. He couldn’t help the wry smile as he gave a low hum, feeling Larry's hips buck suddenly against his face in return. He closed his lips tight around his cock and hummed again, lower this time, louder this time, and his whole body shuddered above him. 

He was leaking, a lot, and when Larry Prime leaned forward to set his hands on the ground his cock dragged a thick trail of precum across his tongue. He started to thrust in a long, slow rhythm, rocking back and forth on his hands and knees as he worked his way in deep as he could. Larry’s face was buried under his stomach, and each time he pushed into his mouth the bottom curve of his belly would grind against his nose. That was a little less fun. Larry used both hands to grab his butt and angle his hips up so he had more room to breathe. His fingers roughly squeezed his cheeks and Larry Prime groaned in return, which is when Larry Reboot had a thought. 

He curled one finger inward and traced the edge of his hole. Larry shivered, but didn’t resist. He pushed in up to the first knuckle, and Larry bit back an embarrassing little whimper. He tugged around the rim in a slow loop, and Larry began to wriggle uncomfortably against his palms. He was dry, and it was rough.

He removed his finger and used the free hand to tap his doppelganger's thigh until he finally pulled his cock out of his mouth. It shuddered as it met the cold air, a dense glob oozing from the tip and leaving a mesmerizing trail as it puddled onto his chest. Larry grabbed him and gave a few stiff pumps from head to base, enveloping his fingers in a thick, slick coat of saliva and pre. He pushed his butt up again and the smaller Larry resumed his position over his face. He sighed as hot breath once more enveloped his member. It was so cold in the outside world. He never wanted to leave again.

His finger slid back in, slick and easy this time. He stretched the rim in a long circle, working his way up to the first knuckle, then the second. When he reached the base of his finger Larry Prime grumbled disappointedly and leaned back, searching for more. Larry Reboot rolled his eyes - sorry for not having giant weird cartoon hands, he guessed. He pulled his finger back out, and before his clone could start complaining he entered again with two. He started anew pushing towards the base, slowly scissoring as he worked his way down. Every time his fingers strained against the rim the older Larry would groan and slide his cock farther into his counterpart’s mouth, who would run his tongue up the shaft and pair it with a low rumble from the back of his throat. When he hit the bottom again he stayed there for longer this time, stretching and teasing the resistance out of his hole. He pulled back and pushed in one, two, three times to test the waters before removing both fingers. Larry Prime uttered a needy, petulant whine while his clone readjusted his hand. His palm pressed up against his taint, his fingers curled in between his cheeks. One tugged roughly on his slick rim so that two more could enter, turning his strained whimpering into a deep, strangled moan. He worked his fingers against his asshole - push, pull, stretch, curl, push, stretch, pull, thrust, thrust, thrust, _streeeetch_. The rhythm was predictable, but his motions weren’t. His hole clenched and quivered, crushing his fingers each time he brought them together before they were pulled slowly, agonizingly apart again. Every so often he’d spread them as far as possible against the confines of his asshole and Larry would fail to hide his laboured panting as his sweaty, shaking thighs gripped either side of his counterpart’s face. Each time his fingers pulled back he would thrust into his mouth, and each time they pushed in he would rock backwards on his knees to meet his palm. The pace steadily picked up as they approached the same wavelength, push against pull against stretch against clench.

Larry noticed his smaller self starting to break rhythm - trying to fit in an extra set of frantic, shallow thrusts each time he leaned forward and pushing down insistenly against his palm each time he leaned back, trying desperately to fuck himself on his fingers. Larry Reboot moved his hips up so he could have a deeper angle, and Larry Prime’s arms wobbled dangerously as he tried to hold himself up. He delved in as far as he could and his fingers worked quickly, erratically, twisting and curling and straining against his aching, tender walls. He felt his cock twitch in his mouth, and he knew that a telltale shudder in the soles of his feet was rapidly escalating. When his hips started to shake dangerously Larry Reboot pulled them flush against his mouth and hooked his fingers down to drum against his prostrate, holding him in place while his tongue swirled past the head and down the shaft, just the way he remembered him doing it before. Just the way he liked it.

He felt his hands dig into his hair, holding on for dear life. A loud, strangled moan ripped through his ears as his mouth flooded with cum. He held his counterpart steady while he shook and twitched and shuddered and sputtered through his load, until he'd emptied himself out completely. 

The shivers long outlasted the orgasm. Larry tugged his fingers out and tapped his hip urgently, but he only curled in tighter around his face. He had to physically pry him off before he could finally escape, leaving his clone curled up on the floor while he scrambled into the bathroom.

The sharp sound of spit hitting porcelain, then an extended period of gargling. Another load spat into the sink. Larry eventually wobbled out of the bathroom and sat down next to himself, still laying in a shivering ball. He reached a tentative hand out to touch his shoulder and Larry Prime nearly jumped out of his skin as a single, horrid sob ripped itself out of his chest. There were tears all of a sudden - oh god, a _lot_ of tears - and he tried desperately to bite back the painful gasps and whines pouring out of him, far beyond his control. 

“Hey, don’t...uh...” Larry wrapped his arms around and gently pulled him into his lap, his back against his chest.  “It’s...okay?”

Larry Prime shook his head, his eyes squeezed shut as if he stood any chance against the flood of tears. “I don’t-- I don’t know why I’m--” A rough hiccup tore out of him. He wiped desperately at his eyes. “I d-don’t know--” 

He got it. He kind of felt like crying too, he'd just gotten it all out at the beginning. He left him on his lap to calm down while he slipped his own shirt off; it was soaked with sweat, among other things, and was starting to get uncomfortable...come to think of it, so was his. Larry Prime gave a shuddering little whimper as his clone pulled his hands around to the front, but he only began to unbutton his shirt. “Here, pull your arms through.”

He did, so the taller Larry carefully slipped the soaked fabric off and tossed it somewhere to the side. Larry Prime gave a wobbly sigh, more comfortable and a little calmer. He didn't flinch this time when the other man brushed his hair back with his hand, pulling wet strands away from his face. “S-Sorry,” he grumbled after several minutes of silence, wiping away one last puddle of tears.

“No, it’s…” He bit his lip. “It’s a lot.”

“Not for that.”

Oh. Larry felt like he should say it was okay - but it really, _super_ wasn’t. Instead he kept his mouth shut and kept fussing with his hair, idly running his fingers through the striking white that had spent decades creeping up his temples.

Larry pulled a glob of snot back into his nose with an ugly snort. “I’m tired of being down here.”

Yeah, he had a point. They had been rolling around on the floor for entirely too long; it sucked and was cold and his knees were starting to complain. “Can I, uh…” He shifted his hands under his tiny counterpart’s butt. “Can I pick you up?”

He frowned bitterly. “Oh, so _now_ you ask first?”

Larry Reboot gave a defeated huff. Fine, he deserved that. “Sorry.”

Larry Prime didn’t respond. Fine, he deserved that too. With a concerted grunt he heaved himself off the floor, carrying his vertically challenged clone with him. He was pretty dense, but manageable; certainly enough to carry him five feet to the bed. Larry plopped him onto the mattress, where he quickly burrowed under the covers like a nervous animal. The taller Larry slipped in after him. “Better than that sofa,” Larry Prime grumbled as he finally settled his head on the pillow.

“I figured it’d be kinda weird to exile you after we, uh…” He grimaced. “Jeez.”

“Yeah.” He grimaced back. “Jeez.”

They went quiet for a while, staring off into nowhere while they listened to each other breathe. The silence was heavy with something that needed to be said, but neither of them could figure out what. Larry Prime occasionally opened his mouth as if he were going to speak, but each time he failed to grasp the words.

“...He never said _anything_?”

There was a hurt in the younger man’s eyes that Larry remembered in himself, long ago when it still meant anything. Aeons before, when he still let it hurt him. 

He shook his head.

Larry’s lip quivered dangerously. The reality that his older self had brought with him was suffocating. If he’d gone his whole life - three extra _decades_ of it - without so much as a call, a card, an attempt to reach out, a way to connect...it meant that _he_ didn’t have a snowball's chance. He could be dead for all he knew, never even having tried. He didn't know why it upset him so much. He didn't know why it mattered. He didn't know why he wasn't enough to stick around for. Larry closed his eyes and clenched his teeth so hard his jaw ached.

Another pair of hands squeezed his, pulling him out of a dangerous spiral. "You don't need him," he heard his own voice say, shaky though it was. "And he doesn't deserve you."

He opened his eyes to search his. Larry Prime scooted closer so he could tangle their legs together. 

"You don't believe me."

Larry looked away.

"S'okay." The older one tucked his head under his chin, face buried in the sharp dip of his collar. "You won't for a while."

A deep sob threatened to leave his throat, but the warm breath on his chest soothed it away. Larry curled down and nestled into his hair, lost in some faint tropical scent.

They used the same shampoo. Of _course_ they did. Larry blew a curt laugh out through his nose.

He heard his clone snort in return. "What?"

"Nothing." He released their hands and wrapped his ungainly arms around himself.

Eventually they fell asleep.


End file.
